I first set foot in northern Oxford County more than 40 years ago when my husband-to-be brought me here to be vetted by his family. It was a year or so later when I heard my husband’s grandmother commanding us from the dooryard: “Don’t tarry at the satellite!” (referring to Telstar, Andover, a satellite that beamed phone signals abroad.)

Over time, again and again, I was drawn back here by the region’s great beauty. I can close my eyes this minute and be back on the porch of Stone Farm, rocking a baby and gazing upon the fields and mountains of Andover in summer. Or watching deer graze in the moonlight.

Over many, many years, the area’s landscape was the lure – summers at Howard Pond, winter weekends with kids lodging in the old post office at the Blue Iris, finally building our “wooden tent” (aka “Jimmy’s camp”) in Rumford Point.

Flash forward to April 1997: It’s a particularly muddy mud season in Maine, but we decide our yard here still looks better than Boston. And we’re old enough now. By November, we’d become full-time residents of Rumford.

More than landscape

The landscape still charms, but there’s a whole lot more to the good life here in the western mountains. Since 1997, we’ve learned how the cultural diversity, the architecture, the grand open stretches along the Androscoggin River, the sense of space, and the people – above all the people – determine the priceless quality of life here.

People here in the valley have a rare and wonderful attitude toward one another. Call it democratic. Where else would you find the distinguished Jack Zollo (honored by the president in the White House Rose Garden) talking with the town’s down-est and out-est street person?

While I’m about it, it’s unusual, isn’t it, to see a memorial wreath placed on that departed street person’s favorite bench? How often in the city does it happen that the man who mows your grass and plows your drive is also a close friend? Or your carpenter stays for lunch with you?

And the people here volunteer. I spent many years in the volunteer “business” back in Boston, but never saw the likes of River Valley volunteers. No matter the cause – a child in need of expensive medical care or no-cost labor for the information booth – people here turn out to help.

It’s said there is no more patriotic American than a new American. I think that can be said too of people like me who have come from away to settle here. I’m an unabashed River Valley booster.

No surprise then that when the Sun Journal invited me to do a weekly column, I jumped at the chance to write about this place and its people.

Over the next weeks and months, I will seek out other River Valley voices and let them be heard here. Local authors, mud runners, beekeepers, kids and many others. Right here. Every Monday morning.

What voices would you like to hear? Please e-mail Linda Farr Macgregor at [email protected]