finding your place

Some landscapes shape us long before we understand what they’re doing. For me, those places were the lakes, rocky coastline, and balsam scented woods of Maine, a 54-acre farm in Pennsylvania that I rebuilt from the ground up, and a rugged Pacific ridge of Costa Rica where an early spark became a complicated tropical dream. Finding Your Place is a memoir about belonging, fatherhood, midlife reinvention, and the hard choices required when the life you built no longer fits the person you’ve become.

The memoir blends storytelling, reflection, and grounded scenes of nature and craftsmanship. It spans three decades and three geographies—each one functioning as both setting and character. As a boy, I spent my summers on Salmon Lake in North Belgrade, Maine, where the sight of chipmunks scurrying across the porch, the invigorating lake water, and the quiet of fishing on fog filled mornings shaped my earliest sense of self. Decades later, after college and early career years, I bought an abandoned Pennsylvania farm and spent twenty years reviving it—planting fruit trees, restoring soil, building structures, raising twin boys in its rhythms, and ultimately creating  community around a wood-fired earthen pizza oven.

Meanwhile, in the background, an adventurous trip to Costa Rica in my twenties evolved into a long-term partnership and shared land project. What began as wonder and connection to the tropical dry forest and waterfalls later became a test of trust, resilience, and the limits of idealistic ventures. That arc—hope, investment, conflict, unraveling—serves as a counterweight to the grounded cycles of farm life and to the quiet pull of Maine that resurfaced again and again.  By the time I reached my late fifties, I found myself caught between three lives:

A farm that had molded me into a father and a steward of land.
A Costa Rican eco-community that had grown unwieldy and uncertain.
And a return to Maine, whose loons and pristine waters were calling me home.

The memoir navigates this crossroad with honesty and humility. It examines the tension between duty and desire, between dreams we outgrow and places that reclaim us, between the identities we build and the deeper truths we return to when those identities crack.

The emotional arc is not about triumph or reinvention through spectacle; it is about the quieter reckoning many readers know intimately: recognizing when a chapter of life is over—and gathering the courage to let it end. The book does not lecture or instruct; rather, it offers readers a companion in their own transitions, using land, family, memory, and failure as mirrors