Cold Spell: The View from the End of the Peninsula
By Todd R. Nelson
Down East Books 2022 

Cold Spell by Todd Nelson has its genesis in the kind of decision many people contemplate but very few in pre-COVID days ever actually enacted: he and his family left their urban lives in Chicago and moved to Castine, a small Maine town on a peninsula jutting into Penobscot Bay, embarking on the adventure of living year-round in what had been their summer vacation spot. Nelson began writing about the experience, and he originally scattered the short pieces that make up Cold Spell in a dozen venues large and small, from the Ellsworth American and the Bangor Daily News to the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Christian Science Monitor. 

Nelson also decided to do something that most people in his position don’t end up doing: he collected those scattered pieces into one book, and that’s a blessing to every reader who might not have all the back numbers of the Adams School Weekly Newsletter at their fingertips. Those pieces add up to a book very much worth reading and keeping. 

The ghost hovering over the whole book is of course EB White, who wrote so lyrically about the wonders of Maine living decades ago. Like White, Nelson gradually grows to love the weird extremes of the place, most notably the cold, which kicks off the collection tones that will be familiar to anybody who’s ever experienced a Maine winter: “The thermometer says it is cold enough to require new language for cold,” goes “Cold Spell.” “The television weather commentators are scrambling for new metaphors. The old figures of speech are too warm. We are in a metaphor inversion: it is burning cold.” 

In these delightful little meditations, he touches on a great many little Maine items – friendly locals, bear encounters, the haunting presence of big owls (“Raptors stifle the smaller species,” he notices when a big one causes all the usual scurrying in his yard to stop), and so on. 

But he’s equally open to deeper meditations, as when a visit to San Regolo, Italy, naturally prompts a mental comparison with Castine – and an appreciation of the commonalities underneath:

And the comparison has reminded me of the time required to be familiar enough with a place to feel that sense of community – the intimacy with neighbors and a particular locale that comes only from spending time slowly. It is the neighborhood scale, in an old world or new world, that reinforces belonging, the time to take care of a vineyard or grove of trees, the time to conserve the land and the friendships that nourish.

It would have been a shame for pieces like these to be lost on moldering archives or broken links. Cold Spell is an unexpectedly charming winter read – and of course a must for Mainers.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News. A compilation of his writing can be found at SteveDonoghue.com.