Feathers of Hope

A Maine Interlude

There's a Baltimore oriole singing outside... which means I'm not in Davis anymore. The blue jays, the chickadees, the chimney swifts nesting in the abandoned smokestack of the old shoe factory, and the ruby-throated hummingbird that's hanging around my sister's rock garden are all constant reminders of how different this place is from the one I live in. The people dress differently, say little. Yup.

The house prices are different, too. The house across the street is for sale. It's a three-bedroom that in Davis would be termed a "cosy fixer-upper," but it also has this barn round back that's been converted to include a granny flat. In Davis something like this would go for over $400,000; here, it's $79,000. And it's been on the market for a year.

Some day, I suppose the urge to own property will overtake me, the way they say the urge to have children overcomes women at some point. Since the latter has yet to occur in my case, and I'm fast running out of time for such things, I'm skeptical about the former. But every so often I get a twinge. This little house, with its unpretentious façade and its proximity to my family, whose younger members are growing up faster than I can keep up with in yearly visits, is definitely the occasion of one such twinge. It would be completely impractical to move here: there's no work for either of us. And midsummer masks the feeling of resignation occasioned by the fifth large snowstorm, let alone the fifteenth...