Southeastern Maine: the Dream is staring at me square in the face. Everything I could have named was material, golden in the early springtime, and before me. And willing to sit me down in the pine kitchen and feed me their field's strawberries and honey from their beehives. The first night there he showed me the eighteen foot canoe he was building with his roommates, and I don't think I have seen anything as achingly beautiful, and adored, and deliberate, as that nearly-finished boat. I think I know you want to be sent off to the ocean in that old Viking burial, smoke curling from the prow.
We rose early and crossed the bridge into Portsmouth on bikes and rode through three hundred year old neighborhoods and navy yards. You even drank coffee with me. You showed me the apartment you had built out of an old barn. There was a handle of whiskey and a pottery workshop there now.
New Hampshire was friendly and loved bluegrass. It bought me beer and gave me teaspoons of birch syrup and honey and cough syrup. A moose skull sat on the hearth, and people had painted portraits.
And I did that thing everyone always tells me to do; to follow my great big slow stupid whale of a heart. I followed that dumb creature and it pointed North instead of West. And I took the train over so many frozen riverbeds and I crossed three state lines. And I walked and after he told me to walk like a fox I could do it without getting caught knee deep in snow. And this morning I walked back to the station and I sulked all the way home because just like I figured I am now all alone, shamed to go back to my apartment, waiting to be missed like the patient land and the empty beehives and the green-eyed calico housecat. For my part I'm putting my fingers to work here so they stay away from the phone. I've completely lost my voice, anyway, so maybe I'll just lay low until the spring thaw stays for good. Then I'll work hard until the months and sorrows pass and I can settle slowly into myself again.
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