Refugees poured into my state. Here’s how it changed me.

Refugees came to rebuild their lives, and rebuilt a town in turn. One Mainer who tracked this former mill town’s yearslong transformation found herself transformed: The native debunked her own biases about the newcomers.

When I was growing up, Lisbon Street in Lewiston was the center of the world. A few times a year, my family drove there from our village 45 miles up the Androscoggin River to shop and to see my great-aunt Nell. She’d moved to the city decades earlier; her husband worked in a mill there. Now...