I want to go to... Maine?

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Maine a lot more than you might expect.

It started with a Christmas card from my wife’s friend, whose family moved from Florida to Maine a couple of years ago. Their card was inviting and festive, featuring picturesque family photos in open spaces with dormant grass and beautiful fall foliage.

It was about a week before Christmas when I plucked the card out of the mailbox and opened the red envelope as I strolled back up the driveway. I was wearing a t-shirt, shorts, and my oldest son’s red and black Crocs. It was probably a pleasant 81 degrees. I didn’t have a thermometer on me, but it’s a pretty safe assumption.

The days are shorter this time of year, and the air feels much drier and more comfortable than during the endless summer months, but the warmth persists. Even for a guy like me, who was born in Florida and has lived here my whole life, it still doesn’t feel like December. I don’t really know what December is supposed to feel like, but I know it’s not this. It should be smoke and chapped lips and runny noses, not lower back sweat and open-toed shoes.

Lately, in an attempt to shift the narrative of my own life, while I’m driving, working out, or doing chores, I listen to an Apple Music mix called “Relax.” This playlist somewhat inexplicably contains very good but extremely stressful songs like “Car Radio” by Twenty One Pilots and “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind, but mainly blends short instrumental pieces and mellow music by bands like The Head and the Heart, The Avett Brothers, Phoebe Bridgers, Counting Crows, and of course, Noah Kahan, whose song “Maine” inspired the title of this post. (Talk about tying this whole thing together.)

I don’t know how to explain it exactly, but the playlist feels like something a person living in Maine in the winter should be listening to. The vibes are immaculately depressing.

The mix is likely curated the way it is because I started listening to Noah Kahan a lot a year or two ago, just like everyone else in the world did, and the algorithm now knows what I like. I instantly related to Kahan’s music because of the melancholy and sense of quiet despair that echoes through each track. His songs are synonymous with New England (there are references to specific streets and places in Vermont scattered throughout the Stick Season album), and as you might have guessed by now, I am synonymous with Florida, so it would appear to be a bit of an odd pairing. However, Kahan’s themes of home and longing for something different, even when deep down you know your life is going to follow a certain path (and that path is probably the one you want to be on anyway), are pretty universal, whether you live in a place where there is a stick season or a subtropical climate like Florida where there are only two seasons (wet and dry).

Although I’m a Florida boy by birth, I’m a northerner at heart. And by that I mean I constantly fantasize about the dark and the cold. The only time I’ve ventured out of Florida for an extended period of time is when I lived in England for one year. It was one of the best years of my life. I loved the winter months when the sun seemed to set around 3:30 in the afternoon.

After that year, my wife and I moved back to Florida and started a family. We never considered going anywhere else. Partially because my wife doesn’t share my yearning for darkness, but mainly because you’re supposed to live where you grow up. That’s just how the world works.

“…I will die in the house that I grew up in,” Kahan sings in his song “Homesick.” And while I probably won’t achieve that goal, the way things are heading, I might come pretty darn close.

Not so fast.

About three hours after I opened that fresh-from-Maine Christmas card, I found us the perfect Maine home on Zillow.

What can I say, I like to work fast on my fantasies. I’ve learned over the years that it’s best to get the required house search step out of the way quickly so I can get back to watching basketball games on TV after the kids go to bed and loading the dishwasher.

I sent the Zillow listing to my wife, who I believe was at some kind of work-related holiday event at the time, and she replied a few minutes later that the house looked pretty good except for the floors. The house was built in 1799, and from what I could tell from the street view, it was located directly across from a nature park. That was ideal because I could bundle into whatever type of clothes one wears in cold weather, and easily take the dog on long, meandering walks while thinking about what kind of rustic hobbies I was going to get into.

The floors did look a little distressed, but I could fix them. Refinishing wood floors is something a guy who lives in Maine would instinctively know how to do.

While I was browsing a few more house listings, this time in Vermont (I was focused on the Alger Brook Road area, somewhere I assumed I was most likely to run into Noah Kahan), my middle kid asked me to measure his height. He’s eleven and plays basketball, so height is very important to him. He stood against the doorframe in the kitchen, and I marked the wall with a Sharpie. The twinkling lights from the Christmas tree illuminated the cramped and cluttered space. He was very excited to find that he’d finally grown about three-quarters of an inch. As I scribbled in the month and year next to his new line, I took a moment to marvel at more than a decade of my children’s history as told by Sharpie lines on a wall.

Then, as one does, particularly in December, I thought about this house, the only one my kids have ever known, being emptied out one day. The walls and wood floors bare. The drawings and random school project posters gone. The only remnants of our lives the paint splotches from long-forgotten art projects on the floor and the Sharpie marks on the wall.

And just like that, my dreams of experiencing stick season and learning how to wear flannel and chop wood evaporated.

The thought of this house being empty and us driving away from it one last time? Even though it’s nothing special to look at (I actually just found a hole in the side of it that the squirrels have been scurrying in and out of), and the location (Florida) is subpar from a cold and perpetual darkness perspective. Nah. I’m not sure I could ever do it.

That’s way too much feeling. No matter how much cold and darkness and cozy depression might be beckoning from the other side. Because, as my guy Noah Kahan says, “It’s better to die numb than to feel it all.”

And it’s impossible to be homesick if you never leave.

Words by me, Andrew Knott. Best known for duck… and Baby-sitters Club.

My books:

Love’s a Disaster - contemporary fiction about a marriage proposal gone wrong, complicated families, mini-golf, second-chance love, Florida, sword fighting, and punk rock music.

Fatherhood: Dispatches From the Early Years - essays and humor about the very early years of my parenting journey