First Maine Winter

One must have a mind of winter/To regard the frost and the boughs of the pine-trees crusted with snow;/And have been cold a long time/To behold the junipers shagged with ice/The spruces rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun;/and not to think/Of any misery in the sound of the wind. 
—Wallace Stevens

          

          You didn't smell the percolating coffee until you reached the little landing with the colored glass window, two-thirds of the way up the stairs.
          But that was in spring, when the house was still empty. It felt like camping, nothing but my air mattress on one of the shiny bedroom floors. The rooms echoed as I walked through them; the old-fashioned coffee pot was cheap, and the coffee was terrible.
          I was so happy.
          Now the cats are curled like brown fists on the bed, and the window on the landing is solid ice. The sun is blinding, yet no match for the cold.
          It takes 15 minutes to get ready to go outside.
          The snow piles up like books, never reducing, but the crunch of our feet on dog walks is musical—slightly vaudevillian. The plow is king, and the rogue pick-ups hurl themselves into the driveways for which they have been hired, sometimes in the morning, sometimes late at night.
          The big plows know just when during the storm to come, and the roads are always tidy and easy to drive. 
          Your face is scalded by the cold air—ironically, as if by hot coffee.

* * *

          My mother and her mother grew up in this town, and I blink and strain my imagination to picture them walking to school along the Union River or having their first jobs in the lunch rooms and general stores that were on Main Street then. Did my mother, at 16, ever walk past this house? Did she have a boyfriend on this street?
          But the history, like a lyric you think you know, won't stay with me intact. My life here feels too present—the big family across the driveway, the brittle plaster walls that won't accept picture hangers, the single toilet, the overloaded healthcare system, the cliques at church.
          Sometime after the moving van arrived, sometime after the late September days when I could still swim up at Branch Lake, sometime before Thanksgiving, my old self reappeared, a perennial that had been cut back hard in May—drowsily sent up shoots in the new soil. The sting was doubly painful for its hardy, predictable return: A whole new group of people who, already, prefer Gary's more considerate, affable style.
          But the house loves me like a dog—the first to have my name on the deed—and I curate its history, too: the childless couple who lived here for 45 years, remembered and adored by the entire town, and, further back—the 93-year-old woman at the end of the block who lived in this house with her in-laws during the Second World War. I take too many pictures of it. I glimpse at it secretly even without a camera in my hand. I pay the utility bills and hire the contractors. I defend its Edwardian elegance against anything farm-like or primitive. 
          Not for the first time, my friends are ghosts—incapable of favoritism or disapproval, flat as the smooth old snapshots of my mother and her sister up on Christian Ridge Road, cooling off in the Branch, or posing on the steps of City Hall in Bobby socks and snoods. She was born here, and I have come to die.
          But not before I have rediscovered Dot Noe's garden, or taken scores of picnic lunches to Schoodic Point, or replaced the gazebo and trained the Concord grape on a large new arbor.
          And, for everything else, a vague acceptance: the putting on of an old, elbowed sweater, the wearing of a certain sort of name tag. The inevitability—and bravery—of simply being oneself, however permanent, however difficult.

* * * 

          At its early April height, there was a single, bright night after supper when we walked the dogs the whole way around the block. The planetary light, the intimacy of the silence, and the persistence of the crystals sifting down onto the lawns and roads already so full of snow seemed so different from the storm before it—which was entirely different from the storm before that one. 
          The light from the street lamps was a rosy, tangerine gauze. The two dogs moved through the drifts like little rocking horses, or paper boats—asses up, now heads up.
          I took scores of pictures that I couldn't share, because everyone was tired of my snow pictures.
          And the next thing I knew, I could see rhubarb shoots and the coiled green dunce caps of the tulips, and it was over.
          At breakfast I could see parts of the lawn. The mid-day sun made the inside of the car hot again, and the potted hyacinth in the kitchen was already dry and stiff. Easter had passed.
          After telling Gary on every dog walk This embankment will be entirely purple in a few months!—now I wasn't so excited about lupines.          
          Ominously warned about March, so afraid of getting stranded in the house, so constantly teased (Do you still like Maine?! they called from across the driveway), I loved each elegantly different storm. 
          Up here they say each winter is different.
          My first Maine winter was the best.