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Falls, turns, failures of sight and hearing and mental acuity, we deteriorate almost without noticing it. Or, if we notice, we are filled with unreasonable optimism. Always before we have recovered, come back to normal. Why should it be different now?
    We drive on, across a final strip of New York State into Vermont and then New Hampshire, past Peterborough, the town where, years ago, I stayed at an artists’ colony to write my first book of serious fiction. Places have a way of inspiring writers, even when they are there to write another book entirely. I recall that Thornton Wilder, a guest there, wrote Our Town at MacDowell Colony and used Peterborough for Grover’s Corners. In my studio there twelve years ago, I read a dedicatory plaque over the fireplace, thought about it for days, made fiction of its suggestive contents, and then wrote Chamber Music . I owe Peterborough much, I think as we drive along its outskirts, MacDowell Colony even more, and most of all, Baetz Studio, where the idea for a novel was born.
    And then, much further on, when we cross the river into Maine, where the air smells of salt and fish, I think how much of my sense of the value of peace and inner serenity I owe to my love for Maine. The color of the air turns from New Hampshire green to the grey of Maine. I feel I am home.
    At May Sarton’s secluded house in York on the Maine coast, I look out once again at the rocks, coast, and sea at the bottom of her long pasture. I think of the July, ten years ago, when I worked there on Chamber Music . We visit her for lunch, bringing the crabmeat we all love, and wine. She is in good spirits although she says her health is poor. The medication she takes for heart fibrillation makes her sick. It is hard for her to work and yet, ‘I have a new novel,’ she tells us. A new puppy, irascible and tiny, occupies old Tamas’s space. There is a new cat to take Bramble’s place. May has transferred her love from the revered dead animals to the new lively ones, although she says it hasn’t been easy.
    Indomitable about her physical ailments, forthright in her opinions, she leads the lunch conversation about the natural world, her beloved birds, and people, those who visit her, as well as those who oppress her with letters and demands. She has written herself into a corner where, proclaiming her love of solitude, she attracts isolatos who want some part of her time.…
    But now that she is ill and age is overtaking her, she understandably wishes she did not live alone. Her neighbors, she feels, do not pay much attention to her.
    We leave and start up the coast, thinking of May and her unresolvable predicament: to be old and ill and alone, sometimes frightened, a writer who has written her widely read journals, which express a preference for being alone. She craves critical recognition; the applause of her fans does not seem to be enough.
    At last we come to the house in East Blue Hill on Morgan Bay that leads to the sea. We have rented it for the terrible Twelfth.
    So. It has arrived, July 12, 1989, the day I find hard to believe in. I have now lived for seventy summers, the season beloved to me for warmth, water, clotheslessness, sun, sand, clear skies. Yet I have forgotten many of those years. I was unaware for too long of much of the time—more than twenty-five thousand days—through which I have moved. Now, I am aware of every moment of every day, especially of the summer days. Now that it is growing late.
    The house we have rented for a few weeks is a rambling place, built by the sculptor Lenore Straus, who died recently. Her friend Peggy Danielson, to whom she left it, is here, living in rooms at one end. We have the luxury of the larger set of rooms, which were built by haphazard addition, a process not unlike budding or binary fission. They seem to have grown out of each other. At the same time, the house has the feeling of organic, calculated design as though the