I am sitting here in Maine thinking about New Jersey. This feels very strange. Not only have I started rereading Richard Ford's most recent Frank Bascombe novel, The Lay of the Land, which is set in New Jersey, but I am editing a book about the Slow Food movement in New Jersey, which will be published by the state's university press. Add to this: my own poetry publisher is located in New Jersey, my best friend died in New Jersey six years ago this week, and half my ancestral heritage is from New Jersey. Clearly I am suffering from spooky Garden State vibes.

Yesterday I received an email from a friend in New Jersey. She hoped that my "weather in the north has as strong a hint of spring as ours does today." My weather does not. Maine is eight degrees above zero and drowning in snow. Mostly I do not wish I were living in New Jersey, but March in Maine makes a person want to be anywhere but here. It is the worst month in the calendar. We imagine spring, and all we get is another foot of snow. Meanwhile, the chickadees sing their little two-note spring song. This only makes us gloomier.

Now is the moment for a pithy quotation about New Jersey, but my 1939 edition of Bartlett's has no entries for "New Jersey" in the index. It does, however, have entries for "New Deal" (Herbert Hoover makes a decimal-point joke), "New England" (the oddness of its hermits), "New Hampshire" ("Anything I can say about New Hampshire / Will serve almost as well about Vermont"--I give you three chances to guess that author), "New Niobe" (she of the "clasp-ed hands"), "New Testament" (nobody has anything interesting to say), "New World" (ditto), "New Year" (it "waits / Beyond to-morrow's mystic gates"), "New York" (James B. Dollard is sick of it), and "New Zealand" (metaphorically equals a place so dull that you might even find yourself taking an interest in the Catholic church). (In unrelated but possibly synchronous news, my copy of Bartlett's once belonged to the United Methodist Retirement Center Library, which is also not in New Jersey.) So because I cannot offer you any snappy New Jersey one-liners from the early half of the twentieth century, I will instead share a few 1970s-era memory snapshots:

Hot sun, and acres of red dust edged with poison ivy. A sweaty orthodox rabbi clings awkwardly to the back of my uncle's combine, in hopes of making sure that all of this wheat chopping is kosher. I have my doubts. His glasses look pretty dirty.

Pizza is called tomato pie. Peaches actually grow on trees, and my aunt makes ice cream from them. My cousin throws up in the hallway after we get dizzy from dancing to Village People 45s. Someone, somewhere, is smoking a cigar. I suspect my father.

Grandparents are Republicans. Parents are Democrats. I don't know what aunts and uncles are. There is arguing. Meanwhile, the kids inspect the Reader's Digest Condensed Books and wish someone would turn down the air conditioning.

Scrapple tastes bad but you have to eat it anyway.

During after-dinner card games, the Republicans and Democrats stop arguing, start drinking martinis and highballs, and energetically josh each other. The kids invent ever louder and more elaborate games in the back room until the dishes in the jelly cupboard start to rattle, an uncle appears demanding decorum and threatening to whale a few tails, and the game is temporarily reduced to hisses and giggles. Repeat till midnight.