When we moved to the small town of Lincoln, Vermont, I was introduced to the town’s beautiful new library. There was an opening on the board of trustees, and I was elected, my chief role fundraising to keep the library operating. I organized a dinner dance and silent auction with items and services up for bid—everything from artwork to leaf raking. H was teaching woodworking at a high school, and I asked him if he could make something for the auction. He made a lamp. A spectacular lamp in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Lantern. A neighbor fell in love with the lamp and bid high. When she won, she designed her entryway around the lantern.

H was surprised and very flattered. He had never sold a lamp before. Maybe he had some talent for this woodworking business. He had learned woodworking one summer when he was a counselor at a boys’ camp. The woodworking teacher showed him how to use the table saw, planer, lathe and hand tools. Late that summer he found a job teaching high school woodworking and architectural design. It was hands-on learning for him.

A lot of H’s students took his tech ed courses thinking it would be an easy A. His young woodworkers turned wood to make bowls. They built boxes and decorated them with carvings and marquetry. They made tables and Adirondack chairs so large that they couldn’t get them on the school bus and H drove them home in his pickup truck. He introduced famous architects and had students choose one to write about—Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, Gaudi, and Mies van der Rohe among them. And, of course, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright was H’s personal favorite. He read books about Wright and his designs. We visited Wright’s famous home, Taliesin West in Scottsdale, Arizona. He fell in love with the prairie style of craftsman bungalow Wright made famous. Over three summers he built a treehouse in the craftsman style. He took a course in stained glass and added a stained glass window that echoes the geometric designs of windows in houses Wright designed. He spent a week taking a summer course in design at Falling Water, the house built over a waterfall that Wright designed for Edgar Kauffman, the president of Kauffman’s Department Stores in Pennsylvania. I have a photo of H washing dishes in the Falling Water kitchen as if he lived there. It was a dream-come-true week for him.

H’s biggest dream was building a vacation house of his own design, and for weeks he spent every spare minute making sketches and then transferring the sketches to a computer program. Unlike Wright’s houses that hug the landscape, H’s stands tall at the top of a hill, but the interior has craftsman touches—cherry trim around windows and doors, a stone hearth with black walnut mantel. Over the mantel he installed two sconces he made of wood and stained glass similar to the brass sconces in Wright’s Robie House. The house turned out to be so beautiful that we sold our city home and moved into the vacation retreat.

After H retired from teaching, he set up a woodworking shop in the tractor shed, smaller and dustier than the school’s with its sawdust vacuum system and state of the art tools. But he had enough equipment to make more lamps. He named his business “Maybe I Will Lamps” because, well, he was retired and didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do. Over the next months he made several more sconces and table lamps with Wright’s ideas in mind, and he built lamps of his own design. Eventually he made a second Prairie Lantern.

Wright designed his Prairie Lantern in 1903 for the library of the Dana House in Springfield, Illinois, with a double pedestal made of brass and a Tiffany stained glass shade in green, yellow and amber. The Wright lantern was twenty-seven inches long, fifteen inches wide, and twenty-six inches high. H’s interpretation is slightly larger. He started his lamp with a rectangular base, the four sides of which have amber glass so that the base can be lit. Four cherry wood columns hold up the rectangular stained glass shade, which also can be lighted independently—or both base and shade can be lighted together. The lamp looks a bit like a model of the Parthenon.

Twelve years ago Wright’s original Prairie Lantern sold at auction for just under two million dollars. H put his lamp on sale for four hundred dollars, a clear bargain. A Middlebury art gallery took the Prairie lamp and displayed it for a few months until a doctor in Seattle saw it online and bought it. Wanting to make sure the light arrived safely on the West Coast, H took it to UPS and had them pack it in two boxes, one for the base and a second for the shade. Each box was the size of a Victorian doll house.

Somewhere in a holding area between Vermont and Seattle, a fork lift operator misjudged and rammed the forks into the box holding the lamp base. After weeks of phone calls, UPS made good on the insurance, but it was far less than the lamp’s actual value. The damaged pieces most likely ended up in a dumpster somewhere.

H shrugged off the loss and started on another lamp. The shade took weeks, cutting glass, grinding and sanding the edges, fitting the cream colored pieces together with a brim of dark glass, and soldering it all together. The base was made of the same cherry wood with wooden lattice for lighting.

When it was finished, H contacted the Seattle doctor, who said he was still interested in the lamp but didn’t want to risk mailing it again. H said we’d drive it out—four thousand miles each way if we meandered off course to see some sights. Stopping for visits with family and friends, he estimated that it would take us a month of traveling.

When he approached me about the idea of the trip, I hesitated. H had a truck he used to plow the driveway and an ancient Volkswagen Beetle he bought from a neighbor. My Subaru was five years old and I couldn’t imagine it getting us all the way to Seattle and back without a breakdown.

“I’m going to buy a new car,” he said.

One thing I’ve learned about my husband after twenty-five years of marriage is that once he fixes his mind on something, there is no deterring him. He built a house and a treehouse, he made a workshop for himself, and he would make this long road trip. And in spite of my fretting, he would make it with me.