Another M state, another adventure!

I thought I'd try my hand at blogging...again.  Seems I get this inspiration when a major life change occurs, ie. moving!  Dental school has come and gone.  What a wonderful adventure it was making life in Ann Arbor, our beloved A2.  We met lifelong friends, surprised ourselves by how much we enjoyed living in a more urban setting and made a very difficult decision to leave the comfort of it all.  Kevin took a "dream job" in Portland at The Center for Laser and Digital Restorative Dentistry...seriously, what a mouthful.  Won't be typing that one out often!  The kiddos will be attending another Waldorf school, Merriconeag Waldorf School in Freeport, Maine.  Just up the road from LL Bean.  Weird.  With all of things seeming to fall into place, we decided why not continue the adventure and live in yet another "M" state with Canada as a neighbor.  So here we are, trying to slowly learn our way around and challenge ourselves without GPS to see if places are familiar enough yet to guide us to our rental house. 

As with any change, there have been very difficult days of thinking "What did we do?" and there are days where we meet someone kind, we make a connection, we have an amazing experience that brings us the comforts of home right here in Maine and we then think, "We're going to be ok here."  It feels almost more of an adjustment moving from Ann Arbor than it did from my 'native land' of Minnesota.  There, we left my childhood surroundings, family, friends I've had since 1st grade and a town we felt so at home.  Ann Arbor was a place we saw as a 4 year stepping stone to a life envisioned, but we were surprised when we all felt very much at home, making it in some ways even more difficult to leave there than was to leave Minnesota.  Perhaps it was the experience of already having left a place we loved, or perhaps it was the ages of the kiddos and their connections that made it so difficult, or perhaps it was that it was the first place we knew no one and we made it, we survived, we thrived.  A combination, I'm sure.  And now here we are, at square one...again.  I know we will survive, I just wonder to what extent we will thrive.

Little discoveries.  That's our goal as went rent a house outside of Portland.  Little discoveries that will lead us to a decision of where to settle next in Maine.  We are still getting used to the fact that we can be at the ocean whenever we want.  Walking outside, it looks like we haven't left, the trees are the same, the birds...then we hear the accent of the Mainers.  And we see all this "lobstah" in everything and we are jolted into grasping our new reality.  We are 'from away' but we now live in Maine, even though our license plates still say Minnesota.

Today, the little discovery was the Portland Farmer's Market.  Having just read a beautiful memoir of the daughter http://www.melissacoleman.com/books/index.htm (thank you for the book, Sonya!) of one of the main forces in the organic food movement in Maine, I saw the acronym MOFGA http://www.mofga.org/ (Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association) everywhere.  The market is held twice a week, Wednesdays downtown and on Saturdays in Deering Oaks Park- a green gem in the midst of Portland.  We discovered many people with dogs, which to me really seem to be a sign of contentment.  People with dogs are happy people, content people.  Anyway...there were artists on the side with their various wares, entertainers, and the market vendors themselves with beautifully grown food that enhanced the landscape with bright colors and what I imagine to be unbelievable taste.  Kevin kept picking up tomatoes to smell the stem.  That is one amazing smell, even if you are not a big fan of the tomato.  It's like fresh-cut grass, or spring rain, or fall leaves.  It invokes memories, takes us to a certain place in time.  For now, that place in time will be Maine, for us.  I know we'll be ok and we have two amazing other "M states" that will call us home from time to time and recapture the memories, just as the tomato does.