It’s Thanksgiving weekend, an annual American festival of absurd overindulgences and hyper-concentrated family time.

This late Autumn finds me back in Maine where I lived for fifteen years between 2002 and 2017. The crispness of the salty morning fog transports me back twenty years. I recall myself as a new mother and a freshly minted Ph.D. arriving on campus as a young assistant professor, suddenly transported from California to what seemed back then like the northernmost tundra of the contiguous United States.

I grew up in San Diego. Snow was only something you saw on TV or visited for a few hours around the winter holidays, either up in the nearby Julian mountains or at Sea World where they hauled it in refrigerated trucks and refreshed it with artificial precipitation machines. My parents, like the other locals with season passes, brought their kids to experience the sorry simulacra of sledding and snowball fights. I was one of those tweens wearing a bikini under my winter clothes so we could head straight to the beach after drinking our overpriced hot cocoa with little marshmallows in the faux Christmas village. Continue reading…