My friend John said the thaw in January was common in Maine. He compared the weather to an Indian Summer - fluctuations of cold to warm weather patterns the Farmer's Almanac called "blips" (because such "blips" didn't happen every year the debate raged on whether it was real or myth). Marie, my landlady, said the opposite: climate change was wrecking with the norms of Maine winters, too many 45 degree days were unnatural during this season.
I preferred John's romantic version of the climate. He didn't care for winter; it was simply the season that segwayed into Spring, the arrival of his seed catalogues, planting, and the frost-free summer growing season from Mid-May to September. Last year he grew kale, sunflowers, summer squash, and the heirloom tomatoes he bought as tasters to the gym where he worked as a trainer to elderly clients whom he trained at the weight room at the YMCA.
When I complimented him on his sweet, delicious tomatoes, we became friends. Funny, he never acknowledged me before, even though I'd been a member of the Y for over three years and had spoken to him on several occasions. But Mainers were not the friendly sort: they were suspicious, judgmental, self-righteous, knowledgeable about most things (they read, marched for a good cause, and traveled the world for exposure to other cultures and peoples) - but not necessarily wiser for it - and theoretical in their practice of goodwill towards strangers and the world-at-large.
Mostly, they were preoccupied with the circadian rhythms of the seasons, rivers, mountains, forests and the call of the wild to enjoy those rhythms by fishing, hunting, hiking, gardening, skiing, canoeing, white river rafting..., and this preoccupation applied to all Mainers, whether they were down-on- their luck or well-to-do white to upper middle class. They also resented their more sophisticated Boston cousins' unspoken opinions of them as farmer types, while also knowing they were more in touch with the wildness and beauty of nature than any city folk could ever claim to know or be. The argument of who was the most authentic Mainer also extended to the North and South of the state, with the Northern Mainers, who lived in unincorporated territory and prided themselves on living of the land, claiming to be the real Mainers.
John didn't live that far north in Maine, but he had enough acres to grow Christmas pines, if he so desired (one of his balsam firs had once made it as far away as Hawaii, as a present to a friend who celebrated the holidays with his aromatic tree).
John always seemed faraway in this thoughts, with pensive blue eyes, bowed head, and a long and lanky meditative walk. He was in his mid-sixties. His wife was a retired English high school teacher, and his kids moved away to California and other New England states for better job opportunities after they finished college. The biggest adventure of his life had been working in avionics for NASA in the 1960s, and while with the agency spending some time in New Zealand and Tahiti, but I gathered there were no heated tales to tell in the vein of From Here to Eternity. He recalled only the rush of annoying tourists, the pretty beaches, naked native children, and constant heat.
He also wanted me to to know that he was not a real Mainer even though he spent more than 30 years in the state after leaving upstate New York (another contentious argument in the matter of being a Mainer was that such honor should only be bestowed on people whose ancestors lived in the state when it was still part of Massachusetts; it also seemed important to to let every one know where you stood on that scale and that you intended to die in Maine as a way of fulfilling your allegiance to your ancestors and descendants.)
"It's the rocks in coastal Maine that make it difficult to plant," John said to me one day with enthusiasm as if he had been daydreaming about Spring and his beloved role as a farmer.
"That reminds me of the Emigrants, the movie with Liv Ullman and Max von Sydow, about a Swedish family who immigrated to the US because the rocks made it difficult to farm their land. Did you see it?"
He thought about it and shook his head. Then remained silent.
I always moved our conversations to different topics, talked about what I knew about Maine from watching the reality show the North Woods, reading Thoreau Maine Woods and the local Portland newspapers. I wasn't gloating about my new found observations, which I acquired after moving to Maine four years ago and watching over 450 movie titles I rented from the Portland Library, the likes of Kurasawa, Melville, Malick... and reading over 30 books by Freud, Celine, Dostoyevsky, Mann....
I needed to release my pent-up knowledge in a coherent and organized manner. (My plans to explore all of Maine by car, bus or train, had to be put on hold after I lost one of my teaching jobs online and was short of cash, so I walked around town, read, and watched movies instead). And then I feared all the big ideas and philosophies I had acquired had interlocked like glaciers in the neurotransmitters of my brain, and I would never be able to make sense of it all or use the information coherently or applicably in real life, but my conversations with John proved otherwise. He thought about what I shared and sometimes asked me about it the next morning when he saw me spinning on the stationary bicycle at the gym: "What is it that you said about Bob Dylan preferring to work with producers from the Northeast because their dealing with the seasons made them better abstract thinkers?"
It felt good to be heard. For the four years that I had lived in Maine, after moving from Miami, Florida, I had not made new friends, just acquaintances with a bit of a passing interest in my company: I met Robert for drinks every two or three weeks, but he just talked ad nauseum about his broken relationship with his partner of 25 years who left him for another man eleven years ago; and Jim called once every two months to talk about his misadventures with a cruel mother who was always up to some mean trick or other, the latest of which was secretly selling the family home and moving deeper into northern Maine without letting her children or grandchildren know where she was going.
My quest to "romance" potential girlfriends (women who owned the shops in town I frequented) with charm, witty conversations, and invitations to join me for a beer never amounted to much. They didn't trust my solitude, my adventurous streak to run away from it all and reinvent myself, live alone, leave the past behind, and forge ahead into the unknown with gusto and flair. Not that it was easy leaving the past behind, and that was not my intention altogether: I had two grown children, away at college, who I supervised from a distance. Sometimes it felt like I was a wartime general radioing in orders from a faraway hilltop. It was a balance knowing how to let them achieve their independence and freedom while practicing my own.
For all the written praises about the lone wanderer, its real life version was not to be trusted, especially if she was a woman, or by other women, who subconsciously believed that a woman should be committed to the stability of family, friends, and a 9 to 5 job as confirmation of her solid and trustworthy nature - even if such a free-spirited woman lived with the blessing of the modern day feminist manifesto.
Thankfully, New England, as the birthplace of the American Revolution, was also the home of the rebel, hermit, and free-thinker, and that was what I had become. When one of my potential Maine girlfriends asked when I was moving back to Florida, I said "never" with all the confidence I could muster. I was done with the unbearable heat that penetrated every inch of the place and its people's inability to think beyond materialistic drives to have the biggest houses, most expensive cars, pools, plastic surgeries.... My only fond memories of Florida were hiking the Everglades with my children. The most ancient of ecosystems wrapped itself around the state in savage, wet, and quiet wonder.
When I shared my concerns about lack of friends in Maine with my hairdresser in Brooklyn, a woman who had some years ago moved to NYC from Moscow, Russia, and who I occasionally visited for a haircut, she said it was sinister of me not to have a pet or a baby. "People don't trust you or come up to if you don't have one or the other," Tania said with some seriousness in a thick Russian accent. I laughed and said I was not interested in either; I had already done that, pets and babies.
I did, though, know something about the sinister in Russia after traveling to the country twice to adopt my now grown children, and watching its great films, such as Serberiade, which evoked the feel and history of its great masses rushing impatiently towards their destiny with fervor, courage, hope, and room enough to later contemplate, with consistency and sympathy, its cruelties, such as hangings and beheadings by Czars, bloodshed during the Mongol invasions, Siberian gulags under Stalin's presidency, and the secret torture chambers of the KGB.
Recently, all the upheaval caused by my move to a place I had never known but only dreamed about was replaced with gratitude for quiet, solitude, and the pleasures of personal pursuits. Regardless of what anyone said, all chapters in life were necessary and natural: the recklessness of youth, dating, marriage, divorce, singlehood, solitude, marrying again, divorcing again, aging, trading youth for youthfulness, and dying. And for me this phase was about about letting go, letting God, letting it happen, especially the seasons in Maine, which in their short tumultuous bursts, did with me as they pleased. This winter was no different.
I walked in Deering Oaks Park during snowstorms and into short piles of fresh, feathery flakes that massaged my warm Muck boots. When others weren't looking, I opened my mouth, caught snowflakes, closed my eyes, and savored their melting on my tongue, like I had seen children do in town; I ate cones of fresh snow that collected on my windowsill; and I allowed long-ago memories to wash over me like bliss, especially the memory of being in love at twilight in Miami, at the time of the day when its skies shifted from hazy brightness to the blue pearl of a meditative nirvana to the black of an eternity disrupted by the pollution of city lights.
Long ago, when I was a divorced, single-working mother, I communicated online, always at twilight, with a man I adored. He was in Europe, a six hour time difference between us. When I got home from work, after getting my children from school, his messages waited for me on my instant messenger. While I cooked dinner, we chatted in the heartfelt and instinctual way that left me breathless and in need of a walk to clear my head and calm my beating heart immediately after our conversations ended. Eventually we met, fell deeper in love, and ended it for all the reasons that never made sense in the long run.
My relationship with this man had been over for seven years, but this winter the memory of its closeness and conversations at twilight came rushing back, so in its honor I took long walks under the dark blue pearl of Maine's winter twilight sky -- in 20 degree weather, with stinging red cheeks, and a sense of breathlessness -- and it felt wonderful.
Image credit: Joy LaForme
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