This May marks 3 years since we left SF for Maine. To be honest I hadn’t really thought of Maine when we were looking for places to live outside SF. I wanted to stay in SF forever. The weather and the culture (which is rapidly dying due to the tech boom) were really ideal for me. I loved the city and its quirkiness, the fog, the parks, the hills, and the list goes on. I never really saw us leaving, then I got pregnant and realized needed more space than a one-bedroom apartment could offer us.
We looked outside SF. All around. We looked at Sacramento. We looked at Portland, Oregon. And then one day my husband said “What about Portland, Maine?” After doing some digital digging I liked what I saw. The Portland, Maine food scene looked on par with SF and the idea of being close to the coast was a huge plus (I love being close to an ocean). So the hunt was on. We would look at houses every day and then our current house came on the market. It seemed to be the perfect fit for us and we put an offer in, without physically seeing it. We had a lovely realtor who did a walk-through and filmed the whole thing, but my husband didn’t fly out until our offer was officially accepted for the inspection.
Everything after that happened rather quickly and honestly, I had a hard hard time with it all. I am not a quick person. I like to work on things slowly. To give you an idea, in college, if I knew I had a paper due I’d start working on it 3-4 weeks before it was due. We uprooted our life and left SF so fast that it left me whirling. I had a new baby, I was living in a new state where I knew no one, I had a new body that I was still getting used to, and I was battling postpartum depression. It was a lot.
But, after a few months, I started to meet people, explore what Maine had to offer, and tackle my depression head-on. Maine is a beautiful place with great food and more places to explore than we usually have time for. While, i’m still getting use to the winters here there is something really magical about this area of the world.