Maine

It's late, the kids are all tucked in bed, my husband's gone, and here I am, once again, completely unable to sleep. Although my body is physically exhausted my brain simply refuses to shut down. After an hour of lying in bed trying to make shapes out of the plaster and the shadows on the ceiling, I have finally given up and turned the light back on.

So here I am, as I so often find myself when my husband is away, suffering from some crazy inability to relax and fall asleep. Why is it that when he is here I sleep so perfectly, even when he is not next to me, yet I am completely unable to fall asleep even when exhausted when he is away?

Anyway, during my pitiful attempt to fall asleep, I was thinking about Maine. My brother is headed up there in a few weeks to visit our other brother and our dad. And I find that I am so jealous! it is such a beautiful place, and now that my relationship with my father is mended and so much time has passed since my childhood (you know what they say - the greatest distance between two points is time), I can think of it so much more fondly.

It is strange to me though, that while some things - the lighthouses and the rocky shore dotted with fishing boats - has remained the same, Maine, like Cape Cod, has changed so much. On the surface are certainly the little things, the Hesper and the Luther Little are gone, the school and the post office have moved, the town is bigger.

But the change runs deeper than that. Surely my generation has grown up, moving away, getting married, having kids, etc. But it's the flavor of the town that I find so different. Even with all the things that are the same, it is hard to recognize the place I once called home.

My brother told me on the phone the other day that he sometimes has a hard time thinking of us as all grown up - that he sometimes imagines us younger. I've thought a lot about it since he called. Maybe it's that we missed so many years together during the divorce. Most brothers and sisters spend their childhood's growing together, their lives on parallel paths, each traveling their own way to their own destination. But with a common starting place and shared experience, you can still arrive at a place of mutual understanding. But our paths carried us all across the country, and it seems we've been carried too far apart.

I find myself wishing I could be back at our shared starting place, with my family, wondering if their is a way to make our paths and our lives intersect.