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little Jetport an hour and fifteen minutes away from the farmhouse, with lobster and moose on the WELCOME HOME signs, we slowly but definitively fell in love with Portland, Maine. We started coming into town more often, eating in the excellent restaurants, admiring the old brick buildings in the small downtown, the seagull-bustling wharves, the long gorgeous views over Casco Bay on the East End, the quiet tree-lined streets of the West End.
    With zeal and zest and a clear sense of purpose for the first time since this whole process began, over the course of the summer andinto the fall, we looked at a total of twelve houses on the peninsula, in Munjoy Hill, the West End, and neighborhoods in the middle of the city, near the Old Port.
    The thirteenth house we looked at wasn’t for sale; the downstairs apartment was for rent, but Brendan, who had found the listing, insisted that we go and see it anyway, on a hunch. When we first walked in, we were struck by its beauty and elegance, although it was worn and shabby.
    â€œWe can’t afford this place,” I said sadly, dazzled by the original plasterwork, the white fireplace mantels with decorative carving, the tall, graceful staircase with its newel-post light. “There’s no way they’d sell it to us even if we could.”
    Thanks to Brendan’s persistence, it turned out that the owners did want to sell, after all, and their asking price happened to be exactly the outer limit of what we could afford, thanks to the money my ex-husband had paid me to buy me out of our house in Brooklyn. And so it came to pass that, on an updraft of optimism and faith, in the fall of 2011, we bought a nineteenth-century brick house in the West End, just off Congress Street. It had been divided into two apartments early on. The downstairs apartment included the first floor and the front half of the second floor, and our inherited tenants lived in the other apartment, the back half of the second floor and the whole third floor.
    We moved in to the downstairs apartment as soon as the deed was in our hands, having never spent a night in Portland before, knowing no one. It was a raw, blustery, rainy November evening. There we were, in our drafty, unfamiliar old house. We sat on the couch, which was the only furniture in the living room besides the double mattress, surrounded by all my boxes and stuff that had arrived that afternoon in a moving van from my two storage spaces in New York, looking around at all the work that needed to be done, asking ourselves, “What the hell are we doing in Portland, Maine?”
    â€œI’m hungry,” said Brendan. “What should we do for dinner?”
    â€œI don’t want to cook,” I said. “Do you? None of our kitchen stuff is unpacked, we have no groceries, and I don’t want to go out. It’s too wet and cold out there.”
    We sat there for a moment.
    â€œWait a minute,” I said. “Of course.”
    In the farmhouse, when I’d found myself homesick for cheap, good, fast ethnic food, I realized that, if I wanted pork dumplings, sesame noodles, or pizza, instead of dialing the local place and waiting twenty minutes, I had to make them myself. And so I did.
    But now, I simply got out my laptop and googled local delivery places. A Vietnamese place called Saigon delivered, and on the menu was beef pho, to my joy.
    I first fell in love with pho in 1989 at a place called Pho Bang on Mott Street. Pronounced fuh , it originated in Hanoi at least a hundred years ago, probably more. Pho was always a treat when I lived in New York, since I never lived near a place that served it, let alone delivered it. “Going out for pho” was a pilgrimage, a mission, a search for exciting comfort and nourishing satiation in a stressful, huge, chaotic city. Pho was something you had to go and get; it didn’t come to you.
    But now, evidently, I could summon a vat of it whenever I wanted, in exchange for ten