How to Cook a Moose by Kate Christensen

emotional-support companions. Make sure to leave enough chicken out of the teriyaki sauce for anyone with a dog who asks for it.

Chapter Four

    A Land of All Seasons
    Often, when I tell others from away that I live in Maine, a fond, wistful look comes over their faces.
    â€œMaine,” they sigh. “I love Maine.”
    Invariably, what they mean is that they used to go to camp up here in the summers as children and teenagers, and now they have dreamy, blissful memories of lakes and canoes, rocky beaches and lobsters, hikes in pine forests, young love, first cigarettes, clandestine cans of beer, unforgettable adventures. I can see it all in their faraway expressions.
    And then they look back at me, eyes focusing as something occurs to them.
    â€œBut what about the winters?” they ask. “How do you stand them? Aren’t they awful?”
    â€œI love the winters here,” I say. “They’re not so bad. They were much worse in New York.”
    And I mean it, for the most part.
    The course of a typical year in northern New England provides so much intense drama and climatic variety, it’s never the same placetwice. People love to discuss the weather up here; it’s the most fascinating and important topic imaginable. In fact, a local saying borrowed from Mark Twain goes, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.”
    Along with the northern Midwest and Alaska, whose winters are often colder, but no longer or more dramatic, the northeast corner of the United States has got some of the most interesting weather in the country. There’s always a surprise: the January thaw, the late-March snowstorm, the occasional late-August frost. This land hosts tornadoes and blizzards, nor’easters and hurricanes. Spring rain gives way to golden sunshine gives way to sleet and fog in the course of a few hours, temperatures fluctuating accordingly.
    Of course, in terms of the people who live here, there’s very little variety. This region, apparently, is called by certain urbanites the South of the North, evidently because it’s populated largely by the type of white people referred to as rednecks by city dwellers, who view them as uneducated, poor, backwoods-dwelling hicks who subsist on Walmart canned and junk food as well as hunting, fishing, foraging, and the occasional roadkill.
    In all, the “non-Hispanic white” population here is 94.4 percent, the highest in the nation. The population is largely made up of people of French, Irish, and peasant English descent, with a very small smattering descended from Poles, Italians, Germans, Scots-Irish, and Swedes. Many families have been here since the seventeenth century and identify as simply American, or Mainers.
    But weirdly, and disturbingly, after the demise of Jim Crow laws in the 1920s, the KKK established a highly active faction in Maine, the whitest state in the Union, persecuting the Irish and French Canadians, i.e., Catholics, the only “other” ethnicity around.
    Despite the relative homogeneity, human nature being what it is, there’s a certain degree of ingrained contentiousness among the various groups of people up here, groups that might seem fairly identical tothe uneducated “from-away” eye. Most of New Hampshire lies cheek by jowl along its common border with southwestern Maine, and New Hampshire is tucked under Maine like a long neck supporting a big head, but despite their compatible and even corollary mottoes, “Live Free or Die” and “The Way Life Should Be,” they’re famously hostile, like Norway and Sweden, or those rival advice-giving identical twin sisters, Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Mainers tell a host of insulting off-color jokes about the degree of incestuousness and stupidity and low-life loucheness of New Hampshirites, who tell the exact same jokes about Mainers. Their hockey rivalry is legendary and ongoing.
    As a newcomer, and a New Hampshire