Vulpes vulpes

This little red fox friend became part of the THIS THIS THIS vernacular eons ago, when I was working on the HOME series. She was hidden in the dark forest of Maine, my one true home. People often say that the Pacific Northwest reminds them of Maine, but this is a bit of malarkey...even though I think I might have said it myself a time or two. But I was drunk on nostalgia and the missing of Maine. No place is like Maine. This is a fact. And the woods there are so unlike those here...

While Pacific Northwest forests are filled with towering, ancient, breathtakingly magnificent beasts of trees, and the floor, storeys below the soaring canopy, is covered with the greenest, most beautiful dinosaur ferns, Maine forests top out at about 20 feet, and the floor is, as my mother would sometimes call my hair after being out in the woods too long, a rat's nest. Yes, Virginia, twenty feet is bit of an exaggeration, but compared to PNW woods, Maine woods are real shorties, and there are a lot more deciduous trees, which stand naked all through the 11.75-month-long winter. So, the gluttonous undergrowth gets a lot of light, and it reeeeeally takes over. "A walk in the woods" is not so much a thing. It's more like a fight to the death between you and whipping branches of wiry bushes, burdocks that leave prickly traces of themselves everywhere for weeks after contact, thorns that big brothers will sometimes stab you with, and the catchall "puckerbrush." This was a battle we waged daily with the woods surrounding our home, because the woods were where we always wanted to be.

The first time I saw a forest that you could casually stroll through was in Westwood, Massachusetts, where my college boyfriend lived. While those trees don't compare to the behemoths out here, I was blown away by these woods that were so different from the wild and scraggly ones I had grown up in 10 hours north. I think wild and scraggly is a good way to describe many things about Maine. Including people.

Wait, I'm supposed to be talking about a fox.

So, foxy here became quite popular. Someone even said she looks like me, and she was sort of adopted as part of my logo. For my aunt's birthday, (on Halloween!) I made her the fall fox illustration at the top of this post, with a full fall moon and purple night sky. Stay tuned for your chance to have your very own copy, when I finally get my print store up this month. Until then, go play in the woods. I will be on a final fall foliage hike this weekend out on the peninsula, and a little bit missing Maine.