Monday, June 9, 2008

Where's home

Talking about the weather makes me think of a phenomenon I observed when I lived in the Boston area, which I did for nineteen years. There I encountered numerous people who had been born there, lived there all their lives, but hated the winters. “So why don’t you move someplace warmer,” I’d ask, perplexed. “Oh, I could never do that.” And they could never do that because this was home. This was the place they were familiar with, the place where their extended family lived, where their friends were. It was where they felt psychologically comfortable (and this was the case even if they didn’t get along with their father, or whatever). How could they exchange mere physical comfort for all that?

Intellectually I can understand this reluctance to “leave home,” but not emotionally. For one thing, my physical comfort is extremely important to me. One of the reasons I live in Maine – and moved to New England in the first place, all those years ago – is that hot weather makes me miserable. My body simply does not function well when it’s hot. And this was as true when I was growing up in Texas, as it is today. I once wrote that I would be perfectly happy to live someplace where it never got any warmer than 68 degrees. I wasn’t particularly fleeing the heat when I left home at eighteen, but once I discovered cooler climes, my fate was sealed.

But it isn’t just physical comfort that is important to me. My soul is fed by beautiful natural environments. Growing up in the urban centers of Texas (San Antonio, Ft. Worth, Dallas), I don’t recall having any sense of natural beauty, except when we would go on camping trips to Colorado. Even now when I go back for visits, it seems to me there is no natural environment. Just endless freeways, shopping malls, what I think of as Auto Miles (one car dealership after another), the reflecting glass walls of business parks. Certainly there are attractive residential areas, with trees, and grass – that gets baked a brittle yellow in summer, unless there is no water shortage and people are able to dedicate great gobs of the precious stuff to keeping their lawns green – but you have to be driving through the piney woods of east Texas, to see much in the way of trees. So much of Texas is gently rolling prairie land, which has its own attractions – you get a nice sense of unfettered space – but it is simply not my idea of beautiful.

Here in Maine I encounter all these people who grew up here, and can’t imagine living anywhere else. And it is for all those reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, but also because Mainers really love their state, terrible winters and all. Like me, they delight in the lush, green natural beauty – which turns stunningly aflame in the autumn, and into a magical winter wonderland at the appropriate season. Like me, most of them prefer cold weather to hot, even if they wish the winters didn’t go on quite so long, even if (like me) they get deathly tired of shoveling snow. And they value the small town pace and friendliness. For most of us, Maine really is “life the way it should be.”

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