Home Again!

I love Maine in the summer. Love love love love it. And I love my life here. I work sometimes at one of my favorite restaurants, where we love to drink wine and eat great food and get silly at the back table after the customers leave. I love to get my groceries at a network of small fish shops, farm stands, neighbors’ gardens and local businesses. I love my weed filled, neglected garden. I love my studio. I love my simple, beautiful old house filled with picturesque, sentimental and endearingly shabby things. I love driving to cool, clear Megunticook lake to swim, or to sheltered Birch Point to dip in the frigid ocean. I love how half of life here looks like a Wyeth painting. I love getting our old car fixed cheap from Kirby Mank down the street. I love the clean, dry smell of fir trees in the heat. I love the sweet perfume of greenery as you pass through a shady glade. I love the ripe, briny smell of the ocean breeze, as refreshing as a cool compress on the forehead. I love the magic action of fireflies filling the air above the tall grasses in the fields on a humid night. Truly, could there be anyplace else as beautiful and pleasing in all the world?

I’ve been so happy the last week or so that it frightens me sometimes. I wasn’t happy, couldn’t imagine ever being completely happy again 3 weeks ago. But I’ve been so blessed by friendship and family and beauty and a bunch of fun in the last few weeks that every day, happiness has been filling me up a little more, getting in a little deeper, winning me over. But happiness has burned me before! And not long ago. Some moments I catch myself paroling the edges of my days for the next struggle or pain. Examining each decision, each turn of events, could this be it? Which way will the trouble come from next?

I know that’s no way to live though. Tim and I have had some major personal, professional, and financial disappointments in the year since we left this house, in fact, probably some of the worst that we could have imagined for ourselves because they were tied to our greatest hopes for ourselves at the time. But the reality is that we’re back here again, and all in one piece too. And much worse could have happened, because technically it always could. But it didn’t. And these days we’re really, really happy moving through our fields, our beautiful old, junk filled barn, the time worn rooms of our house, and at night falling into our creaky, soft, old wrought iron bed to sleep while the fireflies make the most of the night outside. May these days last as long as they possibly can and fortify us with comfort and peace.