Aug. 8th, 1984, we arrived in Waterville, Maine.

This was, of course, the pre-David Greene Waterville, with old streets, an old city hall and old people walking old dogs. I looked around and asked my smiling seatmate, “Where’s the snow?”

“You’ll see.”

After three weeks in a pre-arranged camp on some deserted lake full of algae and loons, we found our new home, a cape with a forest of trees and what seemed to be 70 acres of grass.

“Is this a farm?” I gasped.

“You’ll see,” She said.

The Mainer asked for $95,000. (We had just sold our LA house for $300,000, and that was going fast.)

I pulled $90,000 in Hollywood money from my pocket, they grabbed it and ran, leaving a full vegetable garden in the backyard.

I had never seen a real vegetable garden.

“Who picks that stuff?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” She said, with a weird smile.

“When does it snow?” I whimpered.

“Maybe next month,” She said as we unpacked.

The next day, a parade of Joly family cousins filed into our kitchen for a sit-down welcoming that felt like a drug intervention.

After a lunch of Moxie and whoopie pies, I asked, “When does it snow?”

They laughed and stomped the floor for 30 minutes.

I felt like I was in the movie “Deliverance,” without the guitars.

The next day we were given one of the cousins as a kind of fashion “sherpa” to guide us.

Off we went to Freeport, where, after I had my first ever taste of “lobstah,” we spent three hours in L.L.Bean. We bought hundreds of dollars of everything in wool and three styles of Bean boots. I still have those.

Next stop was an even smaller town called Farmington and a general store called Renys, full of plaid shirts, earmuffs, toothpaste made by a guy named “Tom,” maple candy moose heads, and aprons festooned with lobsters, black bears and deers. Oh yes, two big green rakes.

“What are these for?” I asked her.

“You’ll see,” She said with that new smile. “You’re a Mainer now.”

I did see, and 38 years later, I’m still seeing, now with baggier eyes and trick knees.

But today, as you’ve come to see, I must tell you I have never become a Mainer. After two years of cutting my lawns, raking leaves and shoveling snow, I gave up and hired real Mainers to finish.

I still don’t like walking in the snow or the woods. I’ve survived ticks, caterpillars and a historic ice storm, and I’m still not a Mainer.

I don’t eat lobsters or whoopie pies. I use Crest toothpaste, and I watch guys collect the leaves and blow the snow from my second driveway, as I sit in the house.

All those cousins became lawyers, scientists and judges, and moved away.

It’s Halloween tonight, and it’s cold.

“When does it start snowing?” I ask my partner.

She looks up from her book; smiles the same smile.

“You’ll see.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.