It was snowing in Manhattan in the late ’50s when I met my new girlfriend Kay Joly to work on my Actor’s Studio audition. It wasn’t snow as we know it here in Maine. Let’s call it romantic snow, movie snow. We met and walked in it as I kicked it around and wiped off a spot on a bench outside Central Park.

A young Kay talked about the real snows of her hometown up in Maine, and the characters she grew up with. It was the beginning of something magical … a love scene in real snow.

Kay listened politely as I went on and on about my family with its big sisters of St. Joseph convent, and Skeeter O’Neil’s legendary saloon, and about the night Skeeter’s closed because they had an inch of ice and old men walking home after three beers don’t do ice well.

There was a lot of chatter on our walks about her famous Main Street Gang that included saxophonist Al Corey, who owned and ran a successful music shop. When I arrived here, after awhile he would sit with me in his shop on long summer and winter afternoons and play on his great stock of pianos.

It wasn’t long before I learned that every New England town really did have its Hollywood movie crowd of characters, as in “Grumpy Old Men” and anything with a “Scrooge” in it.

The first real character I ran into was the legendary “Gubby” Jibryne Karter, then the host of the infamous Bob Inn on Temple Street, which is a now, sadly, a sea of rubble. He and his crowd popped up like they stepped out of a MGM comedy.

It was on the street where we bought our house that we suffered our first snowy night in the winter of 1984. I bravely ventured out for wine and bread, the two essentials of life, and was driving home when I came to the turnoff on First Rangeway. This was when I saw four brawny men struggling to push a dead car up an adjoining hill. Following their instructions, I carefully pushed my car up against theirs, and together we got it up and going. I felt like Clark Gable in the 1935 movie “Call of the Wild.” The largest of the men came up to me and stuck his hand in to grab my shoulder in thanks. “Thank you, Mr. Devine, and welcome to Maine,” he said with a big laugh. “You know me?” I asked. “You come down to my place, the Bob Inn down on Temple Street, and order whatever you want,” he said. I just nodded. A sad memory.

I had heard Kay’s stories of Maine winters for years before we moved here, and I was ready  for the worst. The worst would come with the ice storm of 1998, when we would see freezing rain that coated everything in 11 inches of ice. All that ice and no Scotch. After three black, cold nights, buried under every blanket and coat and newspaper we could find, she started to cry. After 11 days and nights in two smoky hotels with Polo, our Old English sheepdog, and a tiny schnauzer named Louie Louie, we survived.

Remember, I came here from Los Angeles, where snow is made from white popcorn and swept up after the first scene. Now, here I am, considering a return to the palm-heavy streets and fake Christmas trees where this handsome old widower will sit and watch on his television the winter Maine snow falling on the frosty windows of the Paul J. Schupf Art Center.