I mentioned in my last post that I moved to Maine in mid-February. Dale made the drive with me, because one person driving birds 12 hours in the dead of winter could have been risky for them, and then he drove back to Pittsburgh to oversee the last of the packing and pickup of our belongings. He came up with Ella Chinchilla in the middle of March.
I feel really good about the choice to move here. Yes, of course it was a bit sad and super disruptive to our whole lives to pack everything up, give up on seeing our Pittsburgh friends in-person anymore, leave our great next-door neighbor and the fantastic park (with owls! and turtles! and a giant bullfrog!) behind, sell our house, buy a whole other house (sight unseen, which was terrifying but went better than it had any right to go), and move our three pets and too many belongings several states away.
But now that we’re here, our little town in Maine has a lot going for it: the ocean is less than an hour’s drive away; the air quality is consistently better than Pittsburgh’s; there are not now and aren’t expected to be many wet bulb days, even after 2040; everyone agrees autumn is consistently more than two weeks long, which I am so excited about; there are sidewalks, which our Pittsburgh-area township lacked; the seafood is great; and the whole vibe here is casual, a lot like Anchorage’s. Honestly, our time in Anchorage more than prepared us for life in Maine: since plowing and shoveling are consistently done more thoroughly here, and the changes in light throughout the year are gentler, I’d say overall it’s an easier place to live. I get more months of using the bike trail, too.
Whenever there are cures for both acute and long covid, I’ll be able to walk to a library, coffee shop, community center, and brewery, which I’m pretty excited about! (The owner of the brewery was willing to wear a mask and let me in 5 minutes before opening to buy some cans of their very tasty beer, so technically, I suppose I can already walk there.) The Post Office is also walkable, so we haven’t actually bothered to figure out if our postal carrier picks up outgoing mail or not. The bike trail is reachable with only minimal road biking, and it winds through some really pretty scenery; it’s a little hilly (it has nothing on Pittsburgh, but definitely enough that I notice), so I get good use out of the e-assist on my bike. The town’s sidewalks take us through some small, cute neighborhoods, so on days with nice weather, walks or bike rides (on the road) are easy and pleasant.
As for the house itself, it has character! The bones are very good, for a house from 1900, and (forgive me for a little woo, here) the place feels friendly, like happy people have lived here. The roofline does not seem to have been planned so much as to have happened, which is too bad, but we’ve still got a couple (few?) more years before we have to worry about roof replacement, at which point I hope we have the money to do a metal roof and solar panels. The previous owners seem to have done a lot of crafts with glitter and sequins, presumably with their children and/or grandchildren, which charms me every time I run into a piece of it. They painted the upstairs floors, which isn’t the choice I would have made, but it does mean the upper landing is really, really cool, with stenciled designs.
A surprise when we got here: there’s a nicely-built wooden shed with power run out to it. It will make a great workshop, and I’m considering insulating it and getting a little portable heating unit for winter. I don’t know why it wasn’t advertised with the rest of the house, but maybe I’m glad: someone else might have beaten us to this place if they’d known! (Maine did not have much spare housing stock, especially within our budget and the moving timeline we had.)
Although they’ve lost their huge window, the cockatiels are happy and are enjoying the chance to explore a new place!
We do have some things to fix, though: Someone who lived here previously was unfortunately “handy” and never installed anything with the screws that came with it; instead, they seem to have chosen at random from a box in which they stored both metal and wood screws of varying lengths, and sometimes they put in fewer screws than they should have. An upper cabinet door fell off in my hand (happily missing my head) last week, and it has me concerned about the quality of the installation of the cabinets themselves. The over-range microwave is installed wrong, too, which is a bummer because it would have been easy to install correctly the first time, if anyone had looked at the manual; but taking it down, making the adjustment, and putting it back up will be a pain. There’s an external half-size door to our basement that lets light in around the edges, so we’ll have to replace that. Based on heating costs last winter, we also need more insulation and probably some other energy-saving modifications, which is normal for a house this age but will take time and money to accomplish.
On that note, we’re also, in deference to summers getting warmer and winters getting weirder, taking advantage of some tax incentives and upgrading from an oil-burning furnace and window air conditioners to a heat pump system. (We set this up within the first six months, but it won’t actually go in until month 7 or 8.) We haven’t decided whether we’re keeping the furnace and the oil, yet, because it might be nice to have a backup heating system; on the other hand, it would also be another thing to maintain annually, with fuel that would eventually go bad if we didn’t use it quickly enough. Since we don’t currently have a generator, the oil furnace also isn’t really helpful in case of power outages, merely weather that’s too cold for the heat pump, which is incredibly rare. So we’re still thinking about that.
You’ll note that I’ve talked at great length about the town and the house, but not really about people. I regret not having been able to throw myself into living in Maine the way I was able to in Alaska: by this point, back then, I had a gaming group and people to drink coffee with. I’m waiting for that covid cure, still, but I also do have some plans to maybe meet more local people (virtually for now) and hopefully hang out (outdoors, distanced, at least partially masked) with some folks around a fire pit this fall.
Next time: talking about that fire pit, or at least the yard and garden around it!
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