Beauty

Even after living my entire life (so far) in Maine, I am not tired of how beautiful our state is. Every morning I get on the interstate and as I round the corner the view never fails to please me, it does not lose its beauty. My parents appreciated Maine, too and passed that to me.

When we were kids, my sister and I would sit on the rocks at Two Lights with our parents and watch the waves for hours. On rides, either family trips or Sunday drives, we'd point out the horses and cows, or count the birds on a wire (I always claimed to see birds on a wire whenever we played Car Bingo.....we didn't need a DVD player, we had windows) and watch the forest or ocean pass. In Rockland with our cousins we had the boats in the harbor, in Winter Harbor with the Billetts we had the ocean. And now, every morning I have the ocean, the forest and a variety of pine trees, birds and meadows that I count on to start my day.

So when people ask me if I mind my hour long commute every day, I think of Mackworth Island in Casco Bay and how it appears to float on the ocean in the morning sun, the bald eagle that overlooks the wetlands from his perch in a tree at Exit 43 and the stand of pine trees at mile marker 41. I hold these images as close as I hold the images from my childhood and say I don't mind the commute at all. And then, with those thoughts in my mind, I think how lucky I am that tomorrow I get to make the drive again.