About the Author

One of my earliest memories is of strutting down Eliot Street in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts and across the Way to the pond with my maternal grandmother, clutching a little brown paper bag of cubed day-old bread to feed to the mallards that lived there.

The ducks paddled over, murmured, came up the shoreline to pick bread from my outstretched hands.

I was entranced.

When I was six, we moved to Maine, up into Portland’s west end – streets lined with oaks and elms and huge old houses chock full of kids. I walked to school every day, rode my bike after supper in the spring and fall, went sledding on the Western Promenade hill in the winter. Whole families walked the neighborhood at Christmas time and sang carols – once with an upright piano loaded into the bed of an old pickup truck!

I played baseball in the back yard.

A few years later, we moved again, up the coast to the Brunswick area, into an old farmhouse with standard connecting architecture: main house, shed and huge barn. It was the beginning of my lifelong preference for old houses.

I went to college in New Hampshire, then moved to Boston, where I spent some time at Houghton Mifflin Company before moving back to Maine. I’ve been here ever since, mostly in the lower Kennebec River valley – from Waterville in the north to Bowdoinham in the south.

I’ve lived and worked on a dairy farm, owned a printing and graphic arts business, and spent nearly twenty years in public education, specializing in English acquisition for students with cochlear implants.

I believe in community service, believe in giving back. I’ve volunteered in a public library and served on the board of a domestic violence agency; I currently co-facilitate support groups for women who are survivors of domestic violence. I am a Quaker, and belong to a small unprogrammed meeting in a nearby town.

I love music, and listen to everything from classical and chorale through jazz and blues to folk and bluegrass; can do a mean jitterbug and hold my own at a contradance. I’m drawn to antiques, especially oak furniture and ephemera (diaries, letters, photographs and autograph books); I am fascinated by social history and genealogy.

Small pleasures include a walk every evening in my neighborhood, the New York Times Sunday crossword, the spread of iris and daylilies in my back yard, morning coffee in bed, a vegetable plot in the local community garden. I enjoy having a house full (houseful? household?) of good friends; my door is open at all times.