I’m not sure if you’re aware, but you’re giving off total colonizer vibes. You float in on your Range Rover with a yellow license plate that reads: MAYFLWR. You lustily study your unrolled map, leering at Maine’s mountain ranges and sexy, sexy lakes with a Hudsonian glint in your eye.

As if the pandemic wasn’t bad enough with its deaths and itchy masks and long-COVID symptoms, we now have to stand behind you in line at local coffee shops while you bark imperial phrases into your oversized iPhone. This state is so pristine! The land is absolutely untouched! I can’t believe no one has discovered this place! I’m loath to admit I entertain visions of your oat milk latte spilling on your rural-adjacent J. Crew jeans.

And speaking of jeans, you’re colonizer outfits are an adorable spin-cycle mashup of Village boho meets backwoods lumberjack, and by that, of course, I mean you bought the entire LL Bean fall catalog. Perhaps Columbus’s men jeujed up their Spanish sailor garb with indigenous flare too. Maybe they called it something fun like Island Chic. In the winter for you it’s Patagonia puffy jackets and smart Bean boots. In the summer it’s wicker sun hats and Toms rope platforms. Sometimes we throw you a bone and say, “Nice flannel. Are you from here?” You blush and thank us and call your friend on your iPhone and tell him that you’re starting to blend in with the locals but not in a bad way. Then you order an oat milk latte.

We overhear you when you tell your New York friend that everything in Maine is on sale. Houses are so cheap here—I can’t stop buying them! You have the giddy tone of a child gorging on saltwater taffy—which you now love, by the way. You yell into your phone that you currently own an oceanside villa (private road), a lake house (dockside), and a ski cabin (ski-in-ski-out, obvi). And you’re just getting started. In your excitement you may have missed the weeping single mother who grew up in Maine, attended community college, became a social worker to help Maine kids who grew up like her, but keeps getting outbid on modest homes now priced like Brooklyn brownstones. Maybe keep the gloating to calls made from your growing empire of houses sprinkled around the state. Or maybe those are inside thoughts. I’ll let you decide.

Quick sidebar. I know you feel you can empathize with the aforementioned single mother, because you know something about being outbid on real estate. Before you moved here, every walkup apartment you bid on was snatched from you by a Saudi prince or a Dubai housewife or Miley Cyrus. It’s your turn to win now. I would discourage you from entertaining such empathetic connections. They are what you and your compatriots might call gaucheries. We’re having fun now, aren’t we!

Just a few more things before you get back to taking over local tennis courts with endless sets of pickleball. Pickleball! People from Maine know that we have a symphony orchestra, fine arts museums, a minor league baseball team, lobster roll stands, and Patrick Dempsey. You don’t need to tell us about them or when we can go to them or what will happen when we meet Patrick Dempsey. We know we will fall helplessly in love when we stare into his eyes as blue-green as the foam waves at Crescent Beach. Oh, and speaking of beaches, we know about those too. Remember, what you’re discovering is something we simply call life. But your enthusiasm is cute and infectious, kind of like syphilis. I believe both can be cured with a healthy dose of penicillin, so if you need to keep one trait feel free to choose this one.

It’s my duty to tell you, since I feel a swelling intimacy as this letter grows, that Mainers have always had an affection for you. It’s just that we, like so many Americans in the modern world, are nostalgic for the good old days. We sit around the lobster pot and share yarns from days of yore when you only occupied the state from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Boy do we laugh thinking about your demanding ways, but also about the money you would spend before you fled at the first bite of fall air. But then you moved here year-round with your remote work at a Manhattan salary and ruined a perfectly good thing. It’s like when your grandparents visit for a few weeks: they’re hard to deal with, but they give you money and someone to joke about with your pals. That’s a hoot. But then they move in, and you have to compete with mee-maw every morning for the bathroom. Good luck with that.

You may rightly point out that the people who now occupy Maine are largely not native to the landscape. I fully agree. There were thriving indigenous populations in what is now Maine before European settlers showed up with their SUV-like boats. The Abenaki, Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq that form the proud Wabanaki Nation were here for thousands of years. I must ask, if the taking of land by force, be it military or economic, was immoral then, does that make it immoral now? Oh, I’ve gone and pushed it too far. I have that habit.

I do hope you’ll take this all to heart. And if you simply must move here because Saudi princes and Miley Cyrus have priced you out of the Upper East Side, then please no more comments about the growing homeless population in our city. Those are human beings priced out of the housing market so you can own a little slice of heaven. We simply are having fun!