Saying Goodbye to Maine

Friday will be our last day here, bringing to an end what has been seven weeks in Maine for 2021. As I was on the lake fishing this morning I tried to calculate how much time I have actually spent up here in my 63 years. It’s fuzzy and all runs together in my memory, all the trips to Webb Lake with the kids, and the ten years of coming to Midcoast. The best I could come up was just a couple weeks shy of an entire year. Then, this afternoon, I started reading a book by the famous Maine man of letters, John N. Cole. He makes this statement which I found both jarring and profound, “I have not lived all my life in Maine, but Maine is the only place I’ve lived my life.” Although it is not completely true for me since I love Virginia and am proud to be a Virginian—a title that still means something—it is at least partially true. The time I spend here has had a greater impact on me than any place I have ever been. I think differently here, eat differently, do different sorts of things. Life feels different, less rigorous with fewer anxious moments. Time loses its relentless grip, freeing you up to stay in the moment…something that I have always struggled to do.

This will be my last blog about Maine for quite a while. We don’t return until July 8th of 2022. That means that from now until then life gets serious again. Back home we have stuff to do, jobs that require our attention, people to see, places to go, grass to cut. I will have two stacks of mail to open. At home it will be 75% political attack mail warning me about how diabolical some candidate is and warning me of how absolutely vital it is that I vote for the other candidate.  My office mail will be 75% junk that wild horses could not make me open. Sometimes I think if it weren’t for junk mail, the Postal service could cut back to three days a week delivery and no one would notice or care, not to mention how much less trash would wind up in the landfill. I received no mail in the seven weeks we spent here. It felt like a great cleansing.

Plenty of bad things happened while we were here. The world doesn’t stop just because we have withdrawn temporarily. A close friend of mine lost a dear family friend to a surprise blood clot in the middle of the night. He was 41 years old. Two family members got COVID. William Shatner went to space. This world keeps on turning. Sunday afternoon when we roll into our driveway, we will be right back in the middle of it all, having been refreshed body and soul by a place that never seems to change. The wind is still fresh in our faces, the lake still shimmers with sunlight, and the loons still call out to us. The lobster is still sweet, the shops still smell of balsam and the sea, and the people are still delightfully quirky. And we still haven’t found our dream camp, which only means that we are an entire year closer to meeting her. 

I will close with another quotation from Mr. Cole from the book, In Maine:

“In Maine, I have watched the wind being born, birthing in the western sky and then feathering the bay’s silken surface with the first tentative touch of its young pinions. I have seen the nor’westers make a sea of our meadow, rolling the high grass in waves that break on the crest of our hill. I have felt the same wind fill a sail with a hard slap that sets my boat a running. It does the same thing to me. It dashes its fresh chill in my face, clears my head and sets my thoughts a running.”