Today is my parents' sixty-third wedding anniversary. It is also the eighth anniversary of the day T and I closed on this house. That means we've now lived in Portland for nearly nine years (including our first year in the apartment on Munjoy Hill). We're not newcomers anymore.

Eight years in this seventy-seven-year-old house, with its rattletrap repair history and wildlife invasions; with its beautiful new kitchen and charming neighbors; with its sociable front garden and its past-glorious neighborhood cats; with its little wood stove and its clothesline; with its two tiny studies housing two tiny private lives; with its bed, built of Harmony ash, and its bedroom window, with its view of the bay-mirror sky and the wheeling gulls.

Well, I can admit, finally, that I'm glad to be here. This little neighborhood, this little house; the gift of being a poet among other poets; the ability to walk out my door to a meal, a market, the bay, even a small wood; the ease of traveling to visit my children. Eight years in, these amenities still feel extravagant. It is hard to explain how far away Harmony was, and is, from such easy congress.

When we moved to Harmony, we were twenty-eight years old and our blood ran hot and we were overflowing with energy and self-will. We would do everything ourselves! We would do everything in the hardest way possible! But now I am almost sixty-one, and I am ready to welcome a little ease. We still work all the time, so our version of ease is not really all that easy. But we've got a furnace and a dishwasher and trash pickup. We're five minutes away from the grocery store and ten minutes away from the bus to New York City. We can walk to a restaurant on a whim. Poets stop by for coffee. Neighbors leave sympathy cards for our dead cat. I came here kicking and wailing. But it's a good place to have landed.