Good morning, and so sorry for missing yesterday's post, but I slightly overslept so didn't have time to linger.

The snow is thick up north, but the skies are brilliant blue, and the sun, rising up over the woods, is vivid. Conversation by the wood stove turns to garden and greenhouse. Firewood piles are dwindling, as are winter supplies of onions, garlic, potatoes. But deer steaks sizzle in the pan, blueberry crisp bubbles in the oven, talk skitters back to childhood. And at bedtime, in a stovepipe-heated room, I press my face against the open window and breathe in the dense oxygen of the homeland.

Now here I sit, in my small house by the bay. Once upon a time, I thought I had left the homeland completely, that I was adrift, but now I see that I have simply slipped my canoe into another watershed. The dark inland rivers are also the tidal rivers that flow to the sea. These places are not separate. The long fingers of the rivers curl me back into the woods, release me back toward the gulf. I travel them, as people have always traveled these life-routes. The great names of the great rivers--Kennebec, Penobscot--are the names of the people who loved them.

This place, Maine. Last night, my friend said she'd read somewhere a claim along these lines: "You're a real Mainer if you arrived here once and then never left." Okay then, we all said. We came when we were young. We stuck it out--the cold, the loneliness, the weary work. And here we are. We count.