I moved to Maine because of Thanksgiving.

Raised in New England, I had left the East Coast for California after graduating from college. It was cool out there. Sun all the time. Sixty-year-old guys who surfed every day.

A refreshing disrespect for the hidebound traditions of the East, which dictated your degree of success based on your social class, your mother's maiden name, your alma mater.

In California, no one had a past and everyone was equal, or at least equally able to make money. The word "liberation" must have been minted in California. Or at least the concept of self-invention.

But then came my first Thanksgiving. And my second, third and, ultimately, 15th. Every one of them was a disappointment.

Why cook turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots and pumpkin pie when it's 70 degrees outside and there are lemons growing on the trees?

How could I possibly enjoy a Thanksgiving that wasn't a haven from the growing harshness outside, that took place not at the end of the year's harvest, but in the middle of an endless, year-round growing season?

What was the point of celebrating the summer's riches and the hard work that went into producing them when it was always summer and the living was always easy?

In California, every fruit-filled, sun-washed golden day could be Thanksgiving -- which meant that no day was really Thanksgiving.

Back here in Maine, Thanksgiving is the great punctuation mark. It is the line between warmth and cold, fertility and austerity, bounty and frugality. And I yearned for it.

I wanted a Thanksgiving with my family and friends that felt simultaneously like celebration and hunkering down, where the chill gray sky and bare landscape outside made sitting down at our groaning table feel like taking comfortable refuge in each other.

Where we turned to one another for warmth and succor as the dark of winter descends.

So we came back to Maine.

And today, I will celebrate Thanksgiving with friends and family as the sun sets and the temperature drops. We will begin the meal as all meals begin in our home, with each of us saying what we are thankful for.

And along with my gratitude for my beautiful children, for the love in my life, for good health and rewarding work, I will be thankful for one more thing: that I am in Maine.

-- Naomi Schalit, opinion page editor