If I'd lived in this town ten years longer, I could say I've known Andy O'Brien, our delegate to the Maine House of Representatives, since he was in diapers. But I can say truthfully that I've known him since my son Tristan, who's about to graduate from high school, was in diapers, because we hired Andy one night to babysit. Andy was about thirteen; we were friends with his family. We came home around midnight to discover Tristan sleeping face-down on the floor of the sleeping loft, and his diaper ...

The first thing I noticed about life in Maine — not about Maine itself, but about the experience of actually living here — was that nobody asked me, "So Richard, what do you do?"

I awoke the other morning to the sound of birds chittering madly and my eighteen-year-old son shouting at me to turn the light off. The bird cries, it developed, were coming from my iPad — an appealing though ineffectual alarm-clock setting — and the boy cries, which worked better, were coming from a loft that my son has appropriated for his own use in addition to converting the entire basement into a tricked-out teen bachelor pad.