“If you want to love your town, act like someone who loves your town would act.”

Melody Warnick, “This Is Where You Belong: The Art and Science of Loving the Place You Live”

Oh, I do love my town. I’ve written thousands of words in the pages about this place called Waterville, and all the surrounding places around it that make me happy. I’m happy I am here. I don’t want to leave. I never wish to be anywhere else.

You know I’ve written about my love of Halloween, and how it’s better here than anywhere I’ve celebrated it, and I’ve spent Halloween everywhere. I’ve written about the people I’ve met here, the small but charming ethnic population.

I’ve written about the old stores and the show runners who ran them that are now all gone.

Yes, when you live somewhere long enough, people and buildings change, even trees change. We used to drive to this clearing up on Colby’s campus on the Fourth of July and watch the fireworks display over in Winslow. Now, 32 years later, the trees up there have grown 10 feet taller, and you can’t see the fireworks anymore. Now we sit on camp chairs on the lawn and listen to them.

Yes, I’ve come to love it, and I’ve made that clear, I think, and I’ve moved on. I’m happy. Can we talk about dinner now? No? OK.

I do bore my St. Louis family with my poetic raps about Maine. She, who even corrects the grammar in my emails, grunts when she reads them. When I get too chauvinistic about summer’s hug and autumn’s grace, she mumbles, “Let’s see how you feel in January.”

I admit, the first snow is lovely and picturesque, and then, after the fourth storm, it gets tiresome. That’s when I darken a bit, drink more wine, wear two sweaters and one around my neck, maybe a woolen cap. But I never let on to her. When she gives me that look, I force a smile and stare her down. “I like two sweaters. It gives me a sense of élan.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to winter in Santa Monica? Just for a year or two?”

She’s goading me. I know goading. I invented goading. Let her goad away.

Yes, there are times in the dead of winter when I resort to fear.

Like when I found a black “thing” on my back and I asked her to take a picture of it with my iPhone camera to email to the dermatologist.

“Doctors don’t diagnose from photos,” she snarkles.

She’s getting good at shopping online, but with that comment, it’s clear she has no grasp of Snapchats.

He did refuse, but complimented me on my social media flair. “Well,” he said, “that could be good or bad. We’ll take a look at it.”

Now for someone like me, “We’ll take a look at it” is ominous.

“I know it’s a melanoma, and I should not have called. I was perfectly happy before I heard that.”

“No, you weren’t,” she says. “You haven’t been perfectly happy since Halloween. You were miserable. You were whining about the pain in your neck. You were convinced that it was scoliosis, and you don’t even know what scoliosis is.”

Right there she’s wrong. I know what scoliosis is. I always Google words before I use them in front of her, and I didn’t think that at all. I knew that I got that pain in my neck from twisting my head trying to see the black thing. I have sensitive neck muscles, and it could have very well been scoliosis.

It’s hot today. Benghazi hot, and privately, without speaking, I’m wishing we were in San Francisco.

I love my town. I love Waterville, and the Olive Garden in Augusta, the Liberal Cup in Hallowell, Walter’s in Portland. The Last Unicorn and 18 Below here in the town I love most.

We sit on the deck, reading, and I turn away toward the trees, wipe the sweat from my brow and secretly, without saying a word, wish that for just a few seconds, three maybe, that I was dangling my feet in the water on the dock in Monterey.

“You hated Monterey. You hated the wind.”

How does she do that? I hate when she does that.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.