Last week’s column received mixed reactions from readers. Some people questioned how I could fall in love with “a place like Bangor.” Other people congratulated me on discovering Maine as one of the country’s best-kept secrets. But nearly everyone who wrote to me last week noted that they are eager to hear my reasons for loving this area, to see whether they match their own, I suppose, or merely exemplify what they don’t understand about Maine and the people who love it.
Dustin and I have lived in many different cities, and in each place there is always a contingent of people who love it and never want to leave. Then there is the opposite: people who are clawing their way to get out. Dustin and I have usually felt the latter.
Outside of the friends we have made in every location, Dustin and I have remained ambivalent about the cities in which we’ve lived. They were simply stops along the way. None was “home.” We were transients, our stay marked with an expiration date, and by the time that date approached, our feelings had definitely soured. We were sad to leave the friends we’d made, but happy to be moving on. The idea of having a “hometown” was laughable.
I came to Maine with the same attitude: “It will just be two years. I can do anything for two years.” I suspect military families use these sentiments as self-defense. If you don’t fall in love with a place, you can easily leave it. And so far, no place we had lived had that special, intangible quality — the feeling of being home — to make me love it anyway. Maine would be no different, I reasoned.
And then — well, I guess it’s true what they say about finding love where you least expect it. One day, just a few weeks after moving to Bangor, I was walking the boys home from school, down the sidewalk shaded with trees, where neighbors already knew our names and often poked their head out the front door to say good afternoon and ask the boys about their day, when Ford, 8, said, “Mom, no other place has ever felt as much like home as Bangor does.”
He gave words to what all of us were feeling.
When I think back on our time spent in other, larger metropolitan cities, my memories are cluttered with thoughts of being in the car, sitting at stop lights, passing billboards in various states of repair and watching (another) new strip mall full of franchised stores go up.
I never knew the name of our postal carrier or the cashier at the grocery store, and not because I didn’t try but because I never saw the same person twice. I also think of the boys spending an inordinate amount of time in the back seat of the car eating fast-food hamburgers as we rushed off to baseball or soccer, then piling into the car again for the long drive home, and falling asleep before we reached the driveway. We spent so much time in the car traveling from one place to another that it’s hard for me to remember a time when we walked. We couldn’t walk. Everything was too far away.
Here in Bangor, I fill our van with gas once a month. We walk to school, the park, friends’ houses and even the drugstore, because we can. There is nothing that I need that isn’t less than three miles away. I can’t remember the last time I saw a billboard advertising personal injury lawyers or sleazy 1-800 numbers. I knew the postal carrier’s name before I had unpacked all our moving boxes. And the boys’ principal knew their favorite football teams by the second week of school.
In a larger city, it takes considerable time (usually a year or more) to find your place in the community. By then, if you are in the military, it is time to move again. I never knew that a place like Bangor — a place where neighbors still bring the “new family” a plate of homemade treats — still existed. My young boys never knew it existed at all.
Of course, this small-town atmosphere is suffocating for some people. In fact, had Dustin and I moved here before we had children, we might have felt the same way. But to be able to raise my boys in a place where they can walk to school and not pass any barbed-wire fences, where the neighbors know their names and where the sky is filled with birds, not billboards, feels like a gift.
It’s not for everyone. Nor should it be. But you know when your family fits in a place like the last piece of a puzzle. For us, that place is Bangor.
Next Week: But, Sarah, what about the WINTERS?
Maine author and columnist Sarah Smiley’s writing is syndicated weekly to publications across the country. She and her husband, Dustin, live with their three sons in Bangor. Sarah Smiley’s new book, “I’m Just Saying …” is available in bookstores. She may be reached at sarah@sarahsmiley.com.