LETTER FROM THE EDITOR – September 2013
By Rebecca Falzano | Managing Editor, Maine Home+Design | Photography Sean Thomas Photography

Female loggerhead sea turtles in the North Atlantic travel more than 9,000 miles round trip to lay eggs on the same shores they were born on. Salmon make a similar homecoming: after several years in the ocean, they return to their natal streams to reproduce. Scientists call this “natal homing” and suspect that these animals are guided by special navigational tools, like geomagnetic imprinting and chemical cues. In Maine, we have a name for this too: the boomerang effect.

On one of those days that’s the picture of summer, on a screened porch overlooking Casco Bay, above the sounds of kids getting their sea legs, in a place I’d never been but that felt familiar, a homeowner was telling me about her son. He’s in his early 20s and had grown up going to summer camp in Maine. He lives in the South now. She’s proud of him, in the way that mothers are, and she seems to know something he might not know yet (in the way that mothers do). “He’ll be back,” she said with conviction. “Maine is his compass.” I thought about this the whole ride home. Maine is his compass. I thought about what it’s like to have a place that is a certainty amid all of life’s uncertainties. A true north. I thought about what it is like to feel a connection to a location that’s so deep, almost biological, that you can’t stay away for too long. Homeowner Tamson Hamrock (Homeward Bound, page 78) traveled the entire world before making her permanent home in Maine where she had grown up. Judith Daniels and Lee Webb both spent childhood summers here (Full Lives, Full Home, page 48) and in adulthood bought a house they originally planned as just a summer place, until, Judith says, “it became too hard to leave. It broke my heart each time we drove away.” 

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that Maine has some kind of hold on you, too. Consider this issue—every issue—an invitation to follow that pull in whatever direction it takes you.