Dress Rehearsal For East Coast Living

Wherein I wore my new old coat

Belgrade Lakes, Maine

Last week, I traveled to Maine for the first time. The Daughter goes to Colby College, it was her homecoming weekend, at the peak of fall foliage season, plus I had a new old coat, so it seemed like the thing to do.

I grew up in New Jersey, but my parents were southerners, so for vacations we either traveled south to visit relatives, climbed pyramids in Mexico, or toured museums in Europe. My peers leaned toward the New England blue-blood species, most with gray-shingled summer homes in Nantucket or cottages on the Cape. Almost all of them headed north for college, while I headed south.

I wasn’t one for the cold back then. I wore turtlenecks and huddled in front of a space heater until May. My longing for warm, dry weather propelled me to Los Angeles after college, that and an offer to work for a Hollywood producer, a grandiose, skirt-chasing friend of my father.

But as decades passed, each hotter than the one before, as wildfires charred mountainsides and ravaged entire towns, and menopause permanently spiked my body temperature, my infatuation with heat began to cool, along with my tolerance for dwelling alongside 20-year-old Influencers with iPhones for appendages, snapping photos of their iced chai lattes.

When I arrived at the Portland Airport last week, I instantly deduced that I was not in Los Angeles anymore.

I drove my rental car from Portland to Belgrade Lakes at night, during a deluge. Cityscape morphed into countryside, streetlights vanished, cars all but disappeared, and I strained to see the white dividing line through the foggy blackness. Maybe I’m just not used to rural driving, maybe mortality seems a little more likely now that I’m 60, but I was white-knuckle terrified all the way to my AirBnB.

The deluge continued the next day. Due to inclement weather, and much to my dismay, Colby canceled the boat trip to their newly acquired island campus on Allen Island, where Andrew Wyeth lived and painted some of his finest work. So after meeting The Daughter and one of her roommates for breakfast, I tried to do some sight-seeing in the rain. The fog kept me from finding my thrill on Blueberry Hill, but I did get a glimpse of Great and Long Ponds.

Blueberry Hill Hiking Trail, Rome, Maine

The rain stopped the next day, the sun shone bright through gold and crimson leaves, and fall felt crisp and glorious on the Colby campus.

I couldn’t get over the color. We don’t have color in Los Angeles. We have palm trees. The trees that do have leaves don’t change color, they just crumple into brown detritus and fall into the gutter. For years, I heard people in L.A. lament the lack of seasons, but I never missed them. I found comfort in the consistency of the weather, the assuredness of dry heat — until the occasional wildfires started to blaze year-round and the city that once seemed so enticing began to feel apocalyptic.

So I strolled around campus taking pictures of color.

The Daughter is a vastly superior photographer, so she took this one from atop the Miller Library Tower.

A few weeks back, a dear friend threw me a going-away party. She roasted me, expressing her surprise that I, someone known to eschew camping because there’s nowhere to plug in a flat-iron, would choose to move to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

You know the saying, people don’t change? Well, sometimes they do. I have. I no longer crave the pulse of a big city. The constant clusterf**k of traffic, the thwack-thwack-thwack of felon-chasing helicopters overhead, the throngs of lip-plumped, $200 t-shirted Angelenos silently screaming ADMIRE ME, these sights I will not miss.

The trip to Maine was proof. There was nary a sign of Botox. The locals had normal bodies, not muscles that had been altered at a gym or a cosmetic surgeon’s office. People weren’t trying so hard. They knew who they were. And, after many years of re-booting my hard drive, so do I.

Here’s a bonus shot of nature.

Great Pond, Belgrade, Maine