Jim did something utterly without precedent then. He took one whole summer off from his work as an estate litigator. We shipped his Triumph Bonneville back east, and since it seemed a little ambitious to travel entirely by motorcycle, we bought a 1992 Chrysler LeBaron convertible for days when we might need a break from the bike.
I’m in my third year now, and though I doubt I’ll ever actually earn a Yale diploma, I’ve learned so much. Some of it in the classroom, a lot of it from my fellow students, who are a whole generation younger than my children. We follow the family through heartache and loss, life and birth, art and stagnation, days of illegal abortion, the draft, computer age, AIDS, early #metoo era, the Challenger explosion, divorce, and so much more. I wasthrust back to my own childhood–many scenes triggered ideas and scenes quite vividly for me. At the time, she was 55 years old and had been in the public eye since 1972, when she landed an essay on the front page of the New York Times Magazine. Entitled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” the piece anointed her the unofficial spokes-teen for a generation of world-weary adolescents.
Though she moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago , when asked where she’s from, Maynard, 63, still says New Hampshire. She spent the summer in the Granite State at a lake cottage she bought sight unseen because she enjoys swimming and prefers quiet when writing. An up-all-night love story wrapped in a mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of Ghosted. BookBrowse seeks [pii_email_be2e2053115ed832a58c] out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Consistently brings emotional authenticity to the long arc of her characters’ lives and to the joy and loss they experience. A profoundly moving chronicle of the primacy of family connection.
When I launched my quest for a lake property, our days were filled with doctor visits and frantic middle-of-the-night trips to the emergency room, and sometimes-weeklong hospital stays. For three full months then, I got to show my future husband all the places I loved best. We traveled to the Seacoast where I came from — fried clams at Petey’s; lobster rolls at Chauncey Creek in Kittery; the Great Bay, where I used to hunt for horseshoe crabs and where, back in the ’60s, my mother and I drove out to Tuttles’ Red Barn for fresh-picked corn. Back then — in the days before GMO changed all of this — you had to eat it within the hour for maximum sweetness. A good fall drive calls for exploring back roads, preferably with no particular sense of where they’re going. I’ll direct you to one of my all-time favorites.
But my favorite part came later — sometime around midnight on Festival Night — when I’d walk back into town alone to take in the sight of all those glowing jack-o’-lanterns with nobody else around. No pumpkin festival this year, because of Covid, but organizers promise it will return. Anywhere deciduous trees are found — and in New Hampshire that means oak, maple, birch, aspen, ash — you’ll get dazzling color. If there’s elevation thrown in, you can expect broad, sweeping vistas, but I’m just as partial to those tucked-away places where what knocks you out is a single magnificent tree or a glimmering view across a pond or lake, or a path through the woods with a red and golden canopy overhead. Lowlands provide another way of taking in the fall colors.