When I left the state of Maine for college, I met my first really rich friends, and I discovered summer could be a verb.

I met my first boyfriend when we were 13, playing 'Dungeons and Dragons' in the basement of my local comics shop. We were from the same small town in Maine but went to different schools.

When you're bi-racial, in the town I was in, in Maine, people kept asking, 'What are you?' It was like I wasn't even human.

My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.

Acadia was founded in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson as the first Eastern national park, aided by rich men, often with middle initials, the 'rusticators,' as they were known then, the first of our wealthy out-of-state visitors.

The beauty of Maine is such that you can't really see it clearly while you live there. But now that I've moved away, with each return it all becomes almost hallucinatory: the dark blue water, the rocky coast with occasional flashes of white sand, the jasper stone beaches along the coast, the pine and fir forests somehow vivid in their stillness.