It's August 18, my parents' 61st wedding anniversary. Also, it's the anniversary of the day Tom and I bought this little house in 2017, and it's the anniversary of the day I bought my little Subaru, Tina, in 2014. Funny how binding agreements keep happening on this day.

So, six years ago today, Tom strode into the hideous kitchen with a hammer, a pry bar, and a saw and ripped it down to the studs. Nine years ago today my sons and I cruised around the Bangor Mall parking lots test-driving cars we couldn't afford and blasting My Bloody Valentine songs on stereos that didn't belong to us.

Six years we've owned the Alcott House, spending all of the fall of 2017 madly rehabbing, finally moving in in December, even though we still had no running water in the kitchen . . . and now here we are, still unfinished, always unfinished, but more settled and content than I would ever have thought possible, me with that giant grief chip on my shoulder, who came to Portland with such terror and dismay.

Twenty-something years in the forest, and now this tame neighborhood: Flowers and a wood stove. Cluttered roofs, a steeple. Dog walkers and bike riders and children playing in the street. Trash pickup and a furnace and the grocery store 5 minutes away. Quiet walks to city woods, the cemetery, the cove. Restaurants, little markets. The familiar faces of friendly neighbors. A buoyant community of writers. Easy travel access to our distant children. I am still bewildered to be in this civilized world, after the wild loneliness of the north.

Anyone who reads this blog regularly is sick to death of my landscape emoting, but I can't help myself. I am like a weed, digging my roots into a crack in the pavement. I break my heart every time I leave a place I love. And I am learning to love here, this provincial seaside town: the oddly archaic niceness of this neighborhood, the flurried hipness of the downtown, the tent encampments and suffering faces in the parks and along the motorways, the snow and the sun and the chop of the bay. All of it, the painful and the sweet. When I have to leave, my heart will break again.