One good use of a cabin is storage.

In recent years I have been taking excess family goods to the camp, including furniture, diningware and photos.

I am trying to fill a wall with pictures in the outdoors, which would include a photo of my grandfather and the trophy bear he shot.

That portrait must date from the 1890s, and I'd like to think that he did not need donuts and/or a rancid racoon corpse to lure the 7-foot animal into range of his rifle.

Another category of goods I store is "my papers."

I have written two books. And since I have not been accosted by any library or institute to donate my notes and drafts, I have been storing them at the cabin.

(An aside: I envision a cartoon showing a couple of university librarians looking over their campus as they consider making a bid for (current) President Bush's papers. One earnest geezer says to the other, "I don't think we're going to need a space much larger than a gardening shed. He didn't read, and everything he wrote was fabricated by someone else.")

My first book was "Quiet Presence: Stories of Franco-Americans in New England" (Gannett Press, Portland, 1980). It sold close to 10,000 copies and is excerpted at the Museum of National Heritage at Ellis Island, N.Y.

The book is about the French-Canadian migration to the mills and shoeshops of northern New England, and is told in first-person accounts by the Franco-American workers themselves.

I have several boxes full of notes, photos and documents.

My other book was "Last Night in Hollywood: A Novel of Faulkner and the Fall Season" (New Sharon Press, Portland, 2004).

It was published by the New Sharon Publishing Company, which was actually my own invention since I published the book myself.

And there is the rub. It is very difficult to promote a self-published book.

Well, that was one rub. The other, which I don't dwell upon, was that it could have been an awful novel and not worth promotion or perusal.

Suffice it to say it didn't sell well.

At any rate, I have all the early drafts of that story, which was a novel about a Boston TV critic in Hollywood searching for a missing starlet.

It was based on my years as TV editor for Rupert Murdoch's Boston Herald in the late '90s.

One chore this spring will be to buy metal storage containers to keep the varmints out of my overflowing cardboard boxes.

Last fall I noticed that mice had been chewing up my photo collection of the Pepperell Mills of Biddeford.

I should get to that task, for it doesn't appear that any library is going to march forward with an offer to store my papers in their climate-controlled special-collections section any time soon.

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