Now back to work...

While in Maine this June, I spent time in Friendship, a beautiful coastal town with a rocky beach and many old homes and fixer-uppers. Harriet Rice, the hero of my novel, was sent to Friendship to recover from typhus in 1834, after her brother Albert died. It was believed that swamp air mixed with effluvia caused typhus and sea air would cleanse the lungs. Harriet was eventually called back home to assist in the care of her sick siblings, several of whom would also die from typhus.

The novel as it is going on is very much about farming, death and survival in rural Maine. This bandstand was here in Harriet's day; this green is where local men mustered during and after the American Revolutionand later at the beginning of the War Between the States, called by some the Civil War. This is also and where hogs on the loose were rounded up and kept in pens