From Shasti O'Leary Soudant:

The first time, things didn't exactly spark. To be fair, we didn't get to see much. It was our show-off-the-baby-tour of my mother-in- law's family. We didn't really get out of the suburbs for most of the visit and our passions were not aroused by perfectly manicured lawns in pristine cul-de-sacs. The second time, there was a guided tour, a raised eyebrow, a sustained glance. I smiled my sexiest smile.

Buffalo smiled back. The third time, we had a real estate agent. We bid on the first house we were shown: a beautiful Queen Anne Victorian right near the park. It had a turret. I swooned like a Brontë heroine when our offer was accepted.

Things moved swiftly from there. My mother did NOT approve. The fight burned up the phone lines and rattled the windows in two states. She was adamant that we not move to a "Godforsaken old steel town she would never even want to visit." But there was no going back. We were in love. We had flirted with cities before, even had a serious fling or two, but this was the real thing. We wanted to stay.

Since 1994, My husband Jethro and I had pinballed around the country, falling in love on the tip of Cape Cod, moving first to Brooklyn, then on to the ultra-bucolic, uber-monochromatic capitol of Vermont. We got married and lived briefly in the Catskills before the isolation wore us down. Colorado beckoned and did its best to seduce us with its 300+ days of yearly sunshine, but after two years of crystal-clear bone-dry weather, my husband was begging for long rainy days and enough moisture to simply blow his nose instead of removing its contents with a pickax.

We moved back to Brooklyn on the waning strength of the dot-com boom, but it was a bruising year, exacting a heavy toll, both financially and emotionally. We were packing for our move to Portland, Maine, on September the 11th, 2001, and arrived at the ocean that same September, shell-shocked and wary, but hopeful that we might be able to afford a house in a few years. Ha. As real estate became the new bull market, places we had had our eyes on ballooned in price faster than we could save the down payment. Two years later our daughter was born and we were off on a whirlwind tour of family and friends with an eye to potential root-planting.

On the word "Buffalo," our Portland friends looked at us like we had three heads. We parried their woefully-misinformed second- and third- hand winter horror stories with a sub-seven-hundred-dollar mortgage, pictures of our beautiful new (old) home and a couple of issues of Artvoice.

We celebrated two years here in July. Two years of meeting wonderful, creative and fascinating people amidst terrific architecture, cool neighborhoods and gorgeous parks. Two years of great food, exquisite art, and music that doesn't bore the pants off your eardrums. Two years of raising our daughter, growing our successful business and digging our bare feet into the rich soil of our gigantic backyard.

Today, the roots are happily sprouting out of our souls.

And that pun is absolutely intended.