Maine has a way of resetting a person without being asked. My sister and I flew up together — two people making a plan that started with "we should probably actually go" and ended, several days in, with neither of us in any hurry to leave.
Leslie and Jeff's place did what only the best houses do: it made you feel at home before you'd earned it. The kind of welcoming that has no transaction in it, no "let's see how this goes" — just open arms and good food and the particular ease of people who have decided, apparently at the cellular level, that warmth is the only reasonable operating mode. My sister and I looked at each other somewhere in the first hour and I'm fairly certain we had the same thought: how have we not known these people our whole lives.
Maine also mattered because it reminded me how quickly chosen family can announce itself when the fit is real. Leslie and Jeff's kindness did not feel ornamental or host-like. It felt cellular, the kind of hospitality that changes the emotional pressure in your body within an hour of arriving. My sister and I responded to that immediately because genuine welcome is easier to recognize than to explain. It enters the room before anyone has to say much about it.
The paired poem's dawn jars make sense to me in that context because the whole trip had a held-light quality to it. Not flashy, not performative, just generously luminous. August 2024 gave me a new part of my personal map: not just Maine as a place, but Maine as a place inhabited by people I trusted almost instantly. That is a rare thing. I want the journal to preserve the rarity of it.
Jars of Dawn
In twilight's hush, the glow begins, A field of jars, light's softest hymns. A girl amidst the dawn's embrace, Each step a dance, the night's erase.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →The mornings helped seal that feeling in place. Maine dawn has a slower kindness to it than the desert, and being inside that slower rhythm with my sister and people who felt immediately safe gave the trip a particular emotional brightness. I still think that kind of trust deserves to be recorded carefully, because it is one of the more sustaining forms of grace a life can hold.
August was also my introduction to the Land Ladies — a group I was welcomed into with more grace and warmth than I probably deserved on first meeting, given that my admission technically required a waiver on the gender requirements. (I am told this was a unanimous decision. I choose to believe that without investigating further.) These are soul-grounded, genuinely remarkable women, and being included in that circle felt like a gift I hadn't known to ask for. Some friendships you build slowly. Some arrive fully formed in someone's Maine kitchen at eight in the morning, and you just have the good sense to stay.
I paired August with Jars of Dawn because the trip had that quality the poem describes — a landscape lit from the inside, moving through something that glows. Lelise and Jeff's hospitality had it. The Maine mornings had it. The Land Ladies, to a person, had it. August glowed. I came home carrying some of it, and I have not put it down.