e years just to enjoy it. Maybe it is that the project possibilities are too numerous to tackle them all immediately, so we are prevented from trying. But, I think it has something to do with a soft, descending sense of permanency that has gently dampened the oft-frenetic move-in phase much like the thick blanket of white snow nestled around our house. For the first time in going on seven years of marriage, we have hopes of staying in one spot for longer than our current year and a half record.I have no complaints about the number of dwellings (this is our 6th) that we have inhabited thus far, moving up and down the coast of Maine, across the country to San Diego, across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and back again. They have all been wonderful places to live. And, while you may think that being back in Maine in January would be a disappointment after sunny bougainvillea-filled Mediterranean climes, we actually like it better now because we learned that, while the grass really is greener there, we prefer the conifers. Also, in reality, January in San Diego is rainy and cool, and Sardinia is even more so but with the added brutal Maestrale wind.
To Eliot, as in T.S. – “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time...” (The Four Quartets). While Maine isn’t actually home to either of us individually, i.e., we are not “Mainers” and never will be since we weren’t born here, it is our home as a pair, as this is where we met. I should mention that when I say we arrived where we started, I mean that we now live a block and a half from Bowdoin, where we both went to school, a few blocks more to the parking lot where we first met, and across the street from Chad’s Senior year apartment where he wooed me with wonderful home-cooked meals and serenaded me on guitar. We walk our dog, Manny, past my freshman dorm nearly every morning and by the chapel where I played my Senior year piano concert. While this all may seem a little too familiar, there has been enough time and experience between it’s really not strange. Even Chad’s job here connects us back to our first meeting, as the company he now works for, Apogee, runs outdoor trips for students, much like those we led when we first met. Although Brunswick is obviously familiar, I now feel like I know it for the first time, as Eliot wrote, because I have a context for it.
Now, for Einstein – I say returning “home”, but, as I said, we are not Mainers at all. So, home is a relative term. And, I am writing about a sense of permanency after a mere four months in one locale, where I really have spent more like two and a half of the last four months here, as much of it has been spent traveling (including this moment, as I am currently flying over New York). So, the staying put part is relative as well. Maybe I should call it nesting, instead of staying put. Some twelve years after finding an emotional nest in each other, we’re 
finally establishing a physical one – a jumping off point for adventures which we hope will continue no matter how nested we get here, and a place to return to from those adventures. Nevertheless, our house already feels like home. This was particularly true after returning from holiday travels on a half cross-country road trip with my mom and Manny. There is something about returning to a new place for the first time, which makes it finally feel like home, and the slower pace of driving across helped me to notice this. Part of the reason Chad and I had driven out to St. Louis was to drive was to bring Manny with us, but the other reason was to bring my mom and a few choice family items, which have been sitting in boxes in my room for several years, back to Maine. My mom described our trip as tracing my songline from home to Maine. Songlines, the title of a book by travel writer Bruce Chatwin, are Aboriginal dreaming tracks. They are paths across the land, which mark a route which is recorded in song, such that you can navigate across the land by repeating the words of the songs. I pictured not a song, necessarily, but more of an imaginary thread which I pulled across with me as we drove east, drawing a tighter, stronger connection between my two homes.
finally establishing a physical one – a jumping off point for adventures which we hope will continue no matter how nested we get here, and a place to return to from those adventures. Nevertheless, our house already feels like home. This was particularly true after returning from holiday travels on a half cross-country road trip with my mom and Manny. There is something about returning to a new place for the first time, which makes it finally feel like home, and the slower pace of driving across helped me to notice this. Part of the reason Chad and I had driven out to St. Louis was to drive was to bring Manny with us, but the other reason was to bring my mom and a few choice family items, which have been sitting in boxes in my room for several years, back to Maine. My mom described our trip as tracing my songline from home to Maine. Songlines, the title of a book by travel writer Bruce Chatwin, are Aboriginal dreaming tracks. They are paths across the land, which mark a route which is recorded in song, such that you can navigate across the land by repeating the words of the songs. I pictured not a song, necessarily, but more of an imaginary thread which I pulled across with me as we drove east, drawing a tighter, stronger connection between my two homes. Enhancing this connection are the many parallels between our new house and my parents’ house in St. Louis. My parents bought their house just after my dad had started a new job, and they were a little nervous about buying a big house at that stage in life, just as we
bought this house just after Chad started a new job and it is a little much for us at the moment. They moved in with no furniture and tackled projects slowly over time (some which are still in progress 35+ years later), just as we did and are. There are also uncanny physical coincidences like the carpeted red staircase with a landing midway up that has a large paned glass window, and our living rooms which are nearly identical in layout and both even share a red wall. We noticed several more of these similarities when my dad visited in the fall. Although, sadly for him, we weren’t quite as nested them and didn’t yet have a bed or heat.
bought this house just after Chad started a new job and it is a little much for us at the moment. They moved in with no furniture and tackled projects slowly over time (some which are still in progress 35+ years later), just as we did and are. There are also uncanny physical coincidences like the carpeted red staircase with a landing midway up that has a large paned glass window, and our living rooms which are nearly identical in layout and both even share a red wall. We noticed several more of these similarities when my dad visited in the fall. Although, sadly for him, we weren’t quite as nested them and didn’t yet have a bed or heat. Having my mom visit helped me to extend previously shallow roots a little deeper and broader. Making the most of my her expertise and interest, we spent much of her visit researching the history of our house, which we’d heard had been designed by the John 
Calvin Stevens (1855-1940), a fairly well known architect in New England. One tidbit of interesting coincidence is that John Calvin Stevens shares the same birthday, October, 8th, as my dad, who is also an architect. After moving in, a neighbor mentioned that our house had been designed by Stevens. A little research led us to a magazine article from 1991 in the Bowdoin alumni magazine, which we tracked down at the library. The article confirmed this, but we were still skeptical, so my mom and I continued to dig. Along the way, we discovered various pieces of Brunswick, Bowdoin, and literary history. We found old pic
tures of our street, Federal Street, with the house where Harriet Beecher Stowe lived while writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, those where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived as students at Bowdoin, and others belonging to prominent Bowdoin professors. We learned that William Albion Moody, the first owner of our house, was born in 1860 in Kennebunkport, Maine, where Chad’s family has roots, and where we were married. We found a picture of him as a small boy in the online Maine historical archives (mainememory.net). He was a Bowdoin Phi Beta Kappa graduate of 1882 and then a math professor at Bowdoin for 42 years. At a cocktail party at our neighbor’s house, we met a math 
professor who mentioned a sign above “Buck” Moody’s office which read, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” from Dante’s Inferno. So, my mom and I went on a hunt in the basements of both Adams Hall (famed for its storage of cadavers back when it housed the medical school) and Searles, but to no avail. Moody also served as acting President of the college for six months and was the treasurer of the Brunswick Public Library Association. He apparently loved to walk the woods around Bowdoin and to canoe. Moody bought the land from the Bryants next door in 1890 and lived in the house until he died. He lived the last fifteen years alone, after his wife, Jennie L, had passed away. Apparently, he slipped on the ice on Federal Street, broke his hip, and died while in the hospital in 1947 at age 87. He left $20K to Bowdoin anonymously upon his death.
Calvin Stevens (1855-1940), a fairly well known architect in New England. One tidbit of interesting coincidence is that John Calvin Stevens shares the same birthday, October, 8th, as my dad, who is also an architect. After moving in, a neighbor mentioned that our house had been designed by Stevens. A little research led us to a magazine article from 1991 in the Bowdoin alumni magazine, which we tracked down at the library. The article confirmed this, but we were still skeptical, so my mom and I continued to dig. Along the way, we discovered various pieces of Brunswick, Bowdoin, and literary history. We found old pic
tures of our street, Federal Street, with the house where Harriet Beecher Stowe lived while writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, those where Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived as students at Bowdoin, and others belonging to prominent Bowdoin professors. We learned that William Albion Moody, the first owner of our house, was born in 1860 in Kennebunkport, Maine, where Chad’s family has roots, and where we were married. We found a picture of him as a small boy in the online Maine historical archives (mainememory.net). He was a Bowdoin Phi Beta Kappa graduate of 1882 and then a math professor at Bowdoin for 42 years. At a cocktail party at our neighbor’s house, we met a math 
professor who mentioned a sign above “Buck” Moody’s office which read, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” from Dante’s Inferno. So, my mom and I went on a hunt in the basements of both Adams Hall (famed for its storage of cadavers back when it housed the medical school) and Searles, but to no avail. Moody also served as acting President of the college for six months and was the treasurer of the Brunswick Public Library Association. He apparently loved to walk the woods around Bowdoin and to canoe. Moody bought the land from the Bryants next door in 1890 and lived in the house until he died. He lived the last fifteen years alone, after his wife, Jennie L, had passed away. Apparently, he slipped on the ice on Federal Street, broke his hip, and died while in the hospital in 1947 at age 87. He left $20K to Bowdoin anonymously upon his death. After hunting in the archives of the local historical society, the special collections at Bowdoin’s library (where Chad worked as a student), the Brunswick town hall, and the Maine History Museum in Portland, turning up no record of Moody’s commission of Stevens, we decided to hunt down the author of the article from the Bowdoin alumni magazine. We managed to find out her phone number, email, and address (and we may have even driven by her house late one chilly evening on the way home from dinner). While all of this didn’t solve the puzzle, it did provide a neat way to connect to the history up here and we learned a lot of other interesting tidbits and met interesting people along the way. And, Julia and I do have a tea date next week. . . We also accumulated quite a pile of materials – photocopies, books, old maps and photographs, and my mom teased me that, soon, word was going to get out that I was the neighborhood expert and they would start adding to my collection, which would grow and grow and take over my nice, spacious historic house (a plight she is familiar with). Oh, how I never thought I’d have any interest in historical research after being inundated by it as a child, but now I do somehow. I have the urge to search for roots here in my new home, and Brunswick is a particularly rich place to connect to. I have lately found myself researching old stories in my family as well – recording stories of my grandparents and my parents. I have realized how much there is to be learned from the past and how good it feels to connect to it. It gives me a frame to weave myself into rather than starting from scratch.
So, I am hoping that we’ll stick around here, put down a few roots and weave ourselves in; and that we'll strike out on adventures more confidently from our newly rooted home base.
