Missing Maine and Mourning Memories- Is It Right To Grieve the Living?

Painting by R.S. Rier, The Bay in Late Summer https://robinrier.com/seascapes/

There is an insatiable hunger in my gut again. It comes back each year like clockwork, this sucking, swirling whirl of magic yarn pulling me to Maine. To the past. I sit up in bed, it's dark out still and the breeze brings warning of summer's close. A closing window of return.

Every year from the first summer of my life I have spent my sun drenched days tucked away in the smallest pocket of the world that mankind has to offer. Maine. And a town I can assure you you have never heard of, and your friends probably haven't either. There are no tourist attractions, no coffee shops or grocery stores. Just a town walled in by a seemingly endless stretch of fog and pine trees, old houses standing guard on the edge of the ocean, their wobbly rotten legs stubbornly refusing death. I toddled on my own stubborn legs up and down that rocky beach from the very first moment I could stand, and the beach rocks were climbed when my coltish legs learned to gain a footing. Maine, a mother of a place.

It's quite easy to paint the picture from memory, actually. Those fields washed in their familiar torrid gold, men bent from age stooping lower now to release the deepest blues. Blueberries, the lifeblood of the town. Once a hotbed for the sardine canning industry, it now lies sleepy as if half given up on the industrial revolution. It's a farse anyway, it seems to say. We have the ocean! What more is needed? The sardine factory is now abandoned. The crooked faded sign on the road sways in the goldenrods' dance to the sea breeze. 

My summers there are magic. There is no other way to put it, no similes or metaphors. Magic. You can hear it rustling in the crisp late summer leaves of the birch trees, a swirling pattern so thick and true it just narrowly escapes the eye. You can feel it ride in over the ocean, across the yard and through the kitchen window, washing the home in golden light. A place so otherworldly, so nostalgic, that words fail.

I grew up with this place. The beach, the sandbar, the little white house keeping watch over the bay. The porch, the loft, the plush carpet in the basement, the daybed, the milk glasses perfectly aligned in the cupboard. All of it- holy. I could list a million things, big and small, all unchanged and returning each year. I can walk through the halls within my mind, pointing out each photo and book on the nightstands and give you a memory attached to all of it. To have a piece of my childhood still standing with magic so thick it catches in your lungs is the greatest feat of my life. Memories so pungent, so stark as if a picture, washes over me like the tide each year I walk through the door. And I am one of the lucky ones who gets to return year after year, living the same three weeks over and over as if I am four, or eight, or twelve- it doesn't matter, it's all the same days. Wake late to the sound of the lobster boats, breakfast on the porch with the shimmering light of the sea, trapsing the beach all day, then falling asleep to the lullaby of the ebb and flow of the sea on the rocks below. Life and all its change soaks every last thing in this life, but Maine seemed waterproof.

I am living my twentieth summer, and I am not returning this year.

To have a place I have written time and time again as unshaken crack at the edges rips up my very soul. No similes, no metaphors. I awake at night to the slightest breeze and imagine the sound of the leaves tapping on the skylight window. It's not real, I'm not there. Oh, how I miss it. What is August if not spent picking the neighbors blueberries, our fingers stained the deepest blue? I wrote a few nights ago in my diary how I feel like the selkie in that story with her skin stolen away. I must return to Maine, I must go back to the past. I feel an urgent call coming in through my window each night from the sea herself, and I can not answer.

Each time a memory arises, I will mention it to my sister or mom. Maybe, they miss it as much as I do, the sounds and smells and feelings all tied together in a sweet bouquet of memories. Maybe, we can feast on those memories together. But alas, the inevitable mention of times changing seems to come up, like the squashing of a flower weaving up through the pavement. Change and I have never gotten along very well. She seems to take or alter everything I care for. I don't care much for that type of greedy behavior, if you ask me. Our one agreement has been that she can have everything else about my life if she just leaves Maine good and well alone. But time is moving quickly now, and I can tell she's reaching for it. I can see it in the gray-to-white hairs on my grandparents heads, the slipping memories in their minds. Change is coming for Maine, and she apparently has no regard for me or my childhood.

My sister seems to be accepting the changes well. She misses it too, I see it in her eyes when we talk about it. There is mournful look, almost wistful. She sees it just like I do, those potent memories. But they never stay long. I think she finds longing for the past pointless. She's always been sensible like that. She's probably right, there's not much point to it.  But isn't there no point in a lot of beautiful things? I'm not sure.

I'm rambling. Nostalgia makes me like that. So does Maine. I guess they're one in the same to me. There isn't much now I can do besides hope everyone and everything runs as fast away from change as possible. Is that foolish to wish for such a thing? Mourning a living thing is difficult. Mourning a place, a time, aging grandparents, and a place of utmost safety and comfort- how is it done? What do I do? It's like the slow fall of erosion into the ocean. I can't ignore the change, it's happening all the same. How do you mourn something you have grown your life around year after year, yet have no power of stopping? 

So many questions. 

I wonder if I'm mourning everything too early. It's not gone after all, and my grandparents are still here tending their gardens and rocking on the porch. The house, too, is standing there right now a thousand miles away with each collected piece of sea glass in it's place. 

The places always stay the same, it's the people that are the ones to change.

Maine will always be there. It has quite a stubborn spirit after all. Like me, I suppose. Just not my Maine. All of that will fade away slowly, and I suppose it will hurt a lot. Losing something so dear will always be painful. I will return when I can. I will name the breeze in memory of the past, even if that is morbid. When you love something that is slowly leaving, maybe mourning it isn't so bad. It feels like taking a long, slow walk to the sandbar.