Phippsburg, Maine
Shortly after we moved here a mouse died under the floorboards of the bathroom. We breathed it for weeks, small doses of death, like inoculations. We imagined the small, quick creature rendering slowly to air.
Phippsburg is a peninsula, a craggy finger reaching out from the coast of Maine into the Atlantic. Like every place in New England there is the sense of history, but here it seems especially weighty. The peninsula is stippled with family graveyards. The dead make their presence felt. They have left us their houses, their crumbling battlements and granite slabs.
Winter comes on and it’s dark at 4pm. The mouse scurries in our minds.
Phippsburg Congregational Church