Brave it Out
In my Maine, we brave it out, despite what this vacationland state thrusts upon us. We push through the frost freezing winters, where icicles hang low from rooftops, where the snow will cover the roads in an icy glaze – endlessly causing the tires of my mother’s Subaru to slide by on the narrow turn onto Pleasant street. The winter captures a Mainer’s life from the months of November to mid March, and we still push through. We stay here, freezing our butts off at the Mulligans gas station, shoveling our driveways at 10pm just to get to school the next morning, and scarcely turning up the heat in the house to 70- because god knows how expensive that is.
As I sit here now, in my English class, looking out the window and finding leaves turning yellow and red, a few descending from the branches of old maples, I can’t help thinking that I’ve braved it all. I’ve braved all of the icy roads, all of the windswept days that spring tears to my eyes, all of the melted snowmen, all of the drenched snowpants after sledding with Laila and Flan. I’ve braved all seventeen winters. I’ve braved it my entire life.
So yes, the winters suck. They’re cold and dreary. They bring about this kind of sadness that only encompasses you when it starts to get dark at 5:00 and the air is below freezing. But Maine isn’t just glacial weather, its blue fruit too.
One of my earliest memories as a kid is making Blueberry Buckle with my mom. We would sit outside for hours, listening to the Greece soundtrack blaring from a kitchen radio, and picking bright blue and slightly purple berries from the bushes around the dock. We would tally the sweet berries and the sour ones and sweet would always outnumber the sour. The sun would beat down on us, our perspiration showing through our cotton T-shirts, but we didn’t have a care in the world. Who could fill the most buckets was the only thing on our minds. When we finally finished picking blueberries, we would sift them through a container, separating the straggly claws of tiny twigs and broken leaves from our newfound prized possessions. From those small berries we made a delicious desert that could only be described as “wicked good”. Sometimes it lasted more than a day, but more often than not, we devoured the buckle within an hour of it cooling. It only made us go out and pick blueberries again.
My childhood was filled with moments like these. It was filled with moments of me and my parents filling up every bucket in the house with as much of those berries as we could, us sitting around the campfire eating our pie and combining it with our sticky smores, and us laughing together with our wild blueberries – the common and famous fruit of Maine. My childhood, however, was also filled with snow days and big long coats. It was filled with wool mittens and hats. It was filled with me wishing I were anywhere except here, feeling tired of the constant cycle of my life, the routine and sameness, the plainness, of Hallowell Maine.
I am applying to colleges this year. I’ve got Grandma Mike and Grandpa Peter on my tail, my cousin Tate wants me to come to New York, my Uncle Shane says he loves Tufts. I’m bombarded with a tough question, one I don’t know the answer to, and when I do know the answer, I’ll be scared to say. Everyone asks me: “Where do you want to go?” My only response is out of Maine.
I’ll always be from the blueberry buckle we made out at camp, and from those defining winters that Maine is notoriously known for. Maine will never leave me, and I’ll never fully get away. I’ve come to acknowledge that those cold winters and wild blueberries have shaped me, created me, molded me into the person I look at today. In my Maine, we brave it out, but I’m starting to realize I don’t have to be so brave anymore.