A friend asked me how I was adjusting to our new life in Maine. We have been here almost six months. It is hard to put the answer into a brief word or two, or even one long sentence.
I told her that I am grabbing emotional anchors.
I am sniffing out people, people I really want to bring into my fold. I am used to being alone, lived alone my entire adult life until I met Martyn at age 42. I like being alone. I also like really good conversation with smart and witty people, people with firm interests-riding, animals, art, forestry, carving, learning, etc-and there are many people like that in Maine. Really interesting folk. I like to laugh, and think, and I have reached a point in my life, or did some years ago I guess, where there is no reason for me to put myself in boring enclaves.
So, part of my life is dangling...with old friends from back West, with memories of a more open terrain that I really do love and miss, of a quieter road, of a more rural setting...part of me, only part of me.
Another part of me is relishing the cold air right now, the blue skies that come with that, the glimpse of a bay from my front yard, the ease of barn chores due to a smaller footprint of barnyard, the twinkle lights the last owner left that make one of the barn's interiors at night so sweet...part of me is relishing that and more.
And yet another part of me senses...at this juncture...that our shift is not complete here. I sense we might relocate within the area at some point. I don't know. This house, built in 1760, is an embracer. I love the house. It always felt that way to me from he first time I saw it online as I sat in Oregon wondering where we would land. It felt like that the night we arrived. It feels like that way now. This house does not have an ego of any kind. It is not haunted either, as many ask. It does have energies I am feeling now that we have been here longer. I have begun to see energy around me, always white light and I am open to communing with it.
This house was a Quaker meeting house at some point. There is a Quaker cemetery on the edge of our land, a very small one. So it does not surprise me that this house feels like a place to begin, to be here for a purpose and then leave and go out into the community. But I don't know about that yet, it is just a sense, and it might feel that way only because we are not totally rooted. I know I felt unrooted in Yamhill County for a long time, but on our farm I felt rooting pretty much right away.
So, I have been open to encounters that feel right. I am not desperate. Nor is Martyn. We are very content in many ways. But I am responding to very specific encounters that make me feel emotionally anchored here. Today I had one. I met a few people in the area over the past six months who kept telling me, due to my horse riding goals here, that I had to meet a specific woman in town. I will call her Ms. Boulé so as not use her real name here. As months went by, I kept thinking I need to call her, to find maybe a new riding friend since she had horses. One day we were driving down the road we knew she lived on, and there was a woman on a horse, and I rolled down the window and said,
"Are you Ms. Boulé?"
And it was, so we agreed to get together, and finally did today. She is going to help me create a riding trail that will be safe, away from the county road, and she also has trials at her place.
I also got to meet her husband who is a painter, her horses, an electrician that lived down the road and stopped in, and a charming man who lived nearby that popped in with a Thanksgiving Day treat for them-he also had sheep, and pool table, which I hope to play at someday in the future.
We talked politics, the state of the world, raising and harvesting animals, and painting. The husband asked if I might come be a model in his portrait painting group. I agreed and he told me how it was a group of all painting levels and would be a good thing to be part of. The painting group is located in a home in an area I really love, about 20 minutes from here, more inland and slightly more pastoral- the thing is, it is an area I kind of have had an inkling, a feeling, a nod from somewhere, that it might be our real final destination. We shall see.
The point is, these are emotional anchors to hold onto right now. Moving is discombobulating. The political uproar has left many of us [yes, not all of us] upended and wobbly. That coupled with a move of the magnitude of ours, requires careful navigation.
All I know is when I was there today at that house, and when I was leaving, I felt this is a home of significance to me here in Maine. An anchor.
