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“You mean the rabbit food eat-ahs?” Perry would joke when visitors asked at the store for directions to the Nearings. Native Mainers spoke in what you might call a dialect of the Kennedy Boston accent. A’s had become r’s, and r’s had become a’s. Melissa was “Melisser.” The combination of e or o with r sounded more like a and h. Mainer was “Maine-ah,” neighbor was “neighbah,” and lobster was “lobstah.” “You can’t get they-ah from hey-ah,” went the famous saying. Other common Maineisms were “A-yuh” for yes, and “Mothah,” as an affectionate name for one’s wife. Children, or friends of any age for that matter, were called “dee-ah,” meaning dear. The word farming sounded more like “famine,” as Brooklin neighbor and Charlotte’s Web author E. B. White pointed out in his essay “Maine Speech,” and bastard, pronounced “bayster,” was often coupled with ole, for just about anything. “He’s an ole bayster, they say, when they pull an eel out of a trap.”

Perry viewed Papa, as he did the Nearings, with a mixture of curiosity, humor, and suspicion. There was no getting around it, the fact that we were “from away” immediately labeled us as “not likely to last the wintah.” Now that the Nearings had lasted nearly twenty winters, they were at least acknowledged as being in existence as residents, even if they did sometimes disappear during the cold months, which was regarded as highly suspect and bordering on the category of “summah folk.” Summer folk had long been populating second homes along the Maine coast as a hot-weather escape from the cities, and their numbers increased dramatically with the easy access provided by the automobile in the 1920s, though they were generally ignored, unless, of course, they were buying something.

Papa had respect for the locals and treated them accordingly. As he was paying for gas that day, he mentioned to Perry that he now had a daughter who’d been born in Maine—perhaps that counted for something?

“Elyut,” Perry said. “You know how the saying goes. If a cat has kittens in the oven, you don’t call ’em biscuits.”

Other locals weren’t so affable. A fellow named Percy, who sometimes worked as Carolyn Robinson’s gardener, thought himself a more able farmer than the “city folk” living on the cape. He took it as an affront that the Nearings, and soon Papa, were recognized and written about for their gardening expertise. In retribution, Percy was known to leave piles of tacks on the final section of road leading to our land, with the intention of causing a flat tire, usually in the most inopportune of situations.

Papa was towing a trailer of manure back from his favorite horse farm when he found himself stranded at dusk by such a flat. Not having a spare, he unhitched the jeep from the trailer and left it by the side of the road, returning the next day with a patch kit. He removed the offending tack and mended the leak, only to find that the trailer’s other tire had been slashed in the night by a vindictive knife.

“Sacre bleu!” Papa swore, borrowing the French Canadian curse used by the locals. At that time of winter, nearly spring, we were down to the bottom of the money stash under the couch, and a new tire was more than Papa could afford. He swore again, this time in English, and then did the only thing he could do—he went and got a job pruning a neighbor’s trees for a few days until he had enough cash to buy a tire and bring the much-needed manure back to the farm.

“How many bastards are this lucky?” he reminded himself with a laugh as he finally patched the second tire. “How many ole baysters,” he repeated in Maine-speak, “are this goddamn lucky?”

In April the white-throated sparrows called out their arrival, the ground thawed, and spring was off and growing again. By that third year, we’d fully succumbed to the seasons. We felt the changes in our blood and waited anxiously as the mud began to grow things. The first blooms were white, as if to match the melting snow. Pale pussy willows proliferated in barren thickets, and snow blue clumps of bluets dusted damp