I was almost late for my hair appointment on Wednesday. My salon is just around the corner these days, about five minutes on foot or two minutes by car, so depending on the calibration of one’s watch, it’s easy to be on time no matter what. I had planned to walk, but something suddenly came up and I had to jump in the Jeep and screech around the corner to Pure Hair for my 5:00 p.m. appointment.

Before I knew it, I was relaxing in the hair chair with a magazine while my color processed. It might have been the Redken Color Gels seeping into my brain or it might have been the events of the day, but an article in Downeast Magazine made me laugh right out loud.

Find Your Maine Style.

I read each stylized word and carefully examined the perfectly glossy pictures. The stunning word portraits clanged around in my head even after Cassidy washed the 3NW Mocha Java out of my hair.

I was thinking about my Maine style right into Thursday and whether people in Maine really lived like Downeast Magazine suggests we do, with our salvaged wood, vintage junk, and recycled lobster trap float ropes. Then the phone rang a few minutes before noon, breaking my contemplation. It was my Moxie BFF, Gina Mason.

“You moved off the family compound too soon! You will not believe what has happened up here on The Ridge.”

I could not believe what she told me. A tractor-trailer truck, speeding along Route 9 on its way to somewhere else, had motored past my old apartment and tipped over near the outer border of the Mason family compound. Its cargo of animal parts littered up the wooded corner, a whole load of stink and flies, according to Gina.

Then again, I could believe it. Mario Puzo’s fictional horse head scene couldn’t top the roadside Route 9 drama. It was the crowning event of a made for Tee Vee week. In the Maine style category, we call this “Classic New England.”

It started when my mother called me from the emergency room on Wednesday to let me know she had to cancel our lunch date. It seems a dog had charged her and her friend while they took their morning walk. Helen was bumped and bruised and her friend suffered a broken wrist. Call it “Natural Urban” in the Maine style category.

And the “something” that suddenly came up before my hair appointment was a wood chuck in my garden. Munching the last four melon plants, the fenced-in critter got disoriented when I shouted “get out of my garden!” and couldn’t remember which way he’d snuck in. Seizing that moment of his confusion, my adrenaline rushing, I picked up a brick and chucked it at him, smacking him solidly in the head and stunning him. Then, I ran over to Breezy’s and said “Hurry over with your pellet gun and put the woodchuck out of its misery” and “I’ve got to run to the hair salon.”

These “man versus nature” collisions can only fall under the “Rustic Simple” category.

Yep, we live pretty stylish lives here in Maine and as much as we fabricate gentle and dreamy interiors, the real action is in our outside world of animal parts, woodchucks, and raging dogs. For these types of scenes, I suggest keeping a pair of colorful rubber boots neatly waiting at the matching mud room door. Oh, and a pair of color-contrasting work gloves next to the brick pile because no one wants to break a nail like I did on Wednesday.

I hope no natural, unnatural, or nautical disaster gets in the way of my trip to The Beauty Box tonight to get my nails buffed up, but if it does, it would just be “Coastal Chic.”

The way life should be.