I would have liked to have been born in my beloved Maine, but to paraphrase a friend, my mother was in Miami at the time, and I thought I should be with her for that particular event.
So I grew up in Miami, donning sweaters when it was 65 degrees and ski jackets – we didn’t know of parkas – at 60. To me, snow seemed exotic. In Miami in the 1970s (I’m old. Shut up.), the elementary school English textbook was called The Roberts English Series. The first poem in the first of the series – at least the first that I remember – was Robert Frost’s magnificent Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I memorized it immediately. Someone had told me that poetry wasn’t to be taken literally, so at 7 or 8 years old, I decided that poem was about death.
It’s been a long time since I was 8, and I now like to think the poem isn’t about death so much as it is about, y’know, stopping by woods on a snowy evening. I picture the woods in Maine, even though Frost published the poem in his New Hampshire collection. Even Frost couldn’t get everything right.
I lived in Maine long enough for it to seep into my soul, and I plan to return one day. I cannot call myself a Mainer, although perhaps my friend Janet, who has impeccable Maine credentials and whose wonderful family embraces and embodies all that is good about the state, wouldn’t mind if I considered myself at least an honorary Mainer.
My years in Maine made me reconsider snow. It is no longer exotic, but it’s still magic.Winter, which toughens Mainers and brings them together, fortified by Leon Leonwood Bean’s boots against a common adversary, begins today, the solstice. Frost, of course, phrased it more elegantly: “The darkest evening of the year.”
Here’s to the magic of this season, wherever you experience it.
