I spent a long day driving into the western mountains and back, but the weather was fine and bright and I hadn't been out that way for several years, so it was good to see old haunts. I've never been a skier but my band used to play at Sugarloaf now and again, and T and I used to drive out that direction for various reasons. But since I've been in Portland, I haven't revisited.

Maine has such variety of landscape. Now I live between the southern coast and the midcoast, which are vastly different from one another--the south has sand beaches, the midcoast is long fingers of tidal rivers, and then Downeast, further up the coast, is granite cliffs. Harmony is in the highlands--rolling hills and forest, at the edge of the true mountain swells, the spine of northern Appalachia that includes ski peaks such as Sugarloaf and Sunday River as well as storied Katahdin. And then there's Aroostook County up north, flat and arable. And then there are the Belgrade lakes, in the southwest. And of course Moosehead Lake, tucked into the crease of the mountains. And our big rivers and their watersheds--the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Androscoggin . . .

As I was waiting for my reading to begin yesterday, I was pondering the big map of Maine pinned up over the library coffee machine--thinking of how much I love this state, thinking how much of it I still haven't seen. My children, away in their city lives, busy and engaged, still pine for the forest and skies of their childhood. I grew up mostly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, and while I miss certain things about them, I can't say that I pine. I do pine for my grandfather's farm in western Pennsylvania, but it's more the people I pine for than the landscape. But Maine in and of itself is eminently worth pining for--stark and stunning, a constant surprise, a vast and beautiful land, welcoming and forbidding, difficult to forget.

The reading itself went well--a small audience but chatty and engaged, and it included an ex-neighbor of mine from Portland who'd moved out there last summer, so that was sweet. And while I didn't manage to get home before dark, I did get home, which is what counts. And when I walked in, T had a fire going in the stove, and he'd made reservations for us at the restaurant around the corner, so we had a cozy and undemanding date night to cap my long day.

Today will be slower, I hope. I'll probably do a lick of housework. I might grocery-shop. We're considering going skating. I'll watch the Bills game. I'll peck at poem revisions and figure out something for dinner.

Head down, head held high. Trudge forward into the wind.