Longer light on the causeway

During May, evenings in Maine last longer. Light settles softly across the water past dinner, inviting long walks and audiobooks that unfold in rhythm with the shoreline.

Sparks Like Stars by Nadia Hashimi is one such book. Hashimi, a pediatrician whose parents immigrated from Afghanistan in the 1970s, writes about displacement, memory, and survival from the perspective of one whose family has lived it.

The novel follows Sitara Zamani, a young girl from a prominent Kabul family aligned with President Daoud Khan. In 1978, her family is destroyed when a communist coup overthrows Khan’s government. Sitara escapes Afghanistan, rebuilds her life in the United States under a new name, and eventually becomes a physician, while still carrying unanswered questions about her family and homeland. Decades later, an encounter with a patient forces her to confront her ongoing anger about her displacement and the violence inflicted upon her family.

The stories beneath the surface

Hashimi’s novel reminds us that many people we encounter may carry histories of war, migration, trauma, or generational displacement that remain largely invisible to those around them.

My own extended family has experienced Afghanistan and the Middle East from a different vantage point: we’ve had multiple family members stationed there through military service. Across the United States, our military brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, returned home shaped by their exposure to the violence in that region. When I was a physician working with the VA, I regularly saw the physical and psychological aftereffects among our veterans.

It can be easy to forget that our veterans and their families were not the only ones affected. Whether we are talking about Afghans who left or those who stayed, the decades-long turmoil caused significant physical and emotional displacement. Afghanistan became a defining conflict for an entire generation, much as Vietnam had been for the generation before.

At the same time, cultures such as Vietnam's and Afghanistan's have long-standing intellectual, artistic, and medical traditions. These are not simply war-torn lands, as suggested by media snapshots and sound bites.

Physicians and other clinicians often have a front-row seat to the nuances.

As physicians, we are trained to be objective, and most clinicians work hard to maintain this objectivity. Still, medicine unfolds in human communities, not sterile abstractions. In smaller towns, specialized practices, or interconnected professional circles, personal and professional lives inevitably overlap.

Hashimi explores the ethical and emotional complexities of this overlap. Sitara’s experience in Afghanistan left lasting wounds. Sitara’s patient, someone she had known as a child before the coup, no doubt carried wounds of his own. Both brought them into their encounters with one another, yet Sitara’s professional role asked her to maintain a level of objectivity that many would find difficult.

Rather than focusing on whether Sitara’s character should have removed herself from the patient relationship (a question other clinicians may legitimately ask), I found myself reflecting on something broader: how experiences of childhood, conflict, loss, and identity continue to travel with us into adulthood and professional life.

As I have written about before, Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen asks a relevant question: What is the overlap between our patients’ stories and our own?

Reader response and what we bring to books

We each bring our lived experiences to our reading. When Sitara talks about using her sense of smell to understand her patients' maladies better, it mirrors something I’ve always done.

Modern medical training in the West does not include classes in clinical olfaction. Chinese medical training, in contrast, recognizes the nose as a powerful observational tool. Hashimi brings that telling detail in almost obliquely, and it reminded me why conversations around books can become so personal.

After years of speaking with artists through Radio Maine and Off the Wall, I’ve found that most creators fully expect people to encounter their work subjectively, given that each art lover arrives before a piece with their own life in tow.

In contrast, many of us have been in classes that emphasized finding the “correct” interpretation of a text; a singular objective meaning we could collectively agree upon.

There is a name for the importance of subjectivity. Reader Response Theory holds that we bring our lived experience to how we interpret literature. The meaning of a book is not entirely fixed or objective—it emerges in conversation with the reader’s own memories, values, losses, and hopes.

That is why I write Books on the Boat and host regular virtual book circles. The conversations surrounding books are rarely just about books. They become conversations about the ways we understand one another.

That feels true not only in art and literature, but also in medicine, leadership, and relationships.

A thoughtful boat book

Sparks Like Stars works beautifully as an audiobook, enjoyed while running the trails of Cousins Island and while walking the dogs around Littlejohn. It is a novel that will likely stay with you long after the last words are spoken or the final page has turned.

Your Turn:

Have certain novels reshaped how you view people whose histories differ from your own?

Leave a comment

For those who continue to join me in this love of reading, and of understanding one another through our own words and those of others, I offer my sincere gratitude.

Up next, The Color of Becoming: A spring reflection on Lìxià, the Chinese threshold into summer that arrives while Maine is still adorned in magnolias and crabapples.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Spring has its own timeline.

This week we’ve seen both sunshine and rain on Littlejohn Island. That is very typical for spring in Maine.

When my children were younger, their spring sports seasons were occasionally interrupted by snowfall. It’s tough to play lacrosse and baseball when the fields are laced with ice.

When I’m planning outdoor activities, I still keep winter gear available well into June. This week, my gloves and ear muffs have come in handy.

Then, just when it feels like we’re working backward, the sun returns again.

On Littlejohn and Cousins Island, the same uneven rhythm appears in the human-made landscape as well. Some new structures and additions are suddenly move-in ready, after months of steady construction. Others still wear their winter tarps.

Despite the week’s chill, the plants continue to unfurl, each according to its own internal timeline. I’ve become fond of one rebellious dandelion on our patio that has pushed its spiky, lush leaves up between two pieces of granite.

That dandelion made me think about the need to be strong in the face of creative adversity.

Those of us who write, paint, sing, parent, teach, lead, or otherwise dare to share ourselves with the world know how hard it can be to keep unfurling our tender leaves when the landscape has little give.

Which brings me to Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences by Neal Allen and Anne Lamott.

Emily Blaschke

The rules we keep, break, and share

Having reflected not long ago on another book about writing, I enjoyed seeing how this book diverged from Elizabeth McCracken’s work. The main difference was in the co-writing.

Neal Allen and Anne Lamott bring distinct voices to the page. Each writer honors certain larger rules of craft, while also carrying a private set of rules shaped by temperament, experience, and faith in the sentence. They can be both complementary and unique in their approach.

I found their collaboration to be intriguing.

Writing has rules. Life does too. Some rules help us build. Some keep us safe. Some become habits long after they have stopped serving us. Some only reveal their usefulness when another person enters the project, and suddenly the page, the room, or the relationship needs to hold more than one way of seeing.

As Neal Allen writes, “A rule may be of universal use, but need not be universally used.” That sentence holds an important life truth.

This truth extends to studios, clinics, boardrooms, family kitchens, and island building sites where people keep learning which structures support the work and which ones need to be bent, revised, or released.

In that sense, Good Writing is not only a book about improving sentences. It is a book about trust and respect. The page itself becomes a shared resource.

In narrative medicine, we often talk about the power of noticing: the pause, the word choice, the story beneath the story. Good Writing asks us to notice, then implement, artfully. Anne Lamott writes beautifully about precise verbs. The right verb, she suggests, can stop a reader on the page.

What creative conversations keep teaching

Neal Allen and Anne Lamott are partners both on the page and in real life.

There is a growing literature on couples who build things together. Jennifer Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD, spent five years interviewing dual-career couples across 32 countries on 4 continents for her book, Couples That Work. Her findings kept coming back to the same place. The partnerships that endure are the ones that can hold two distinct selves in the same room. The ones where each voice is offered the same opportunity to be heard.

The durable partnerships let more than one set of rules sit on the table, visible and usable, and build a project that would not exist if either person had written it alone.

That is what Good Writing keeps modeling in its own form.

Good Writing also models the art of resisting perfectionism in the interest of finishing.

Artists are very familiar with learning the rules and deciding when the rules no longer serve the work. A painter may know composition, color, scale, and surface, yet still need to break something open for the piece to breathe. A sculptor may begin with structure and discover that the material has its own opinion.

The same theme shows up outside the studio. Leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, community builders, and storytellers all describe the tension between discipline and freedom; responsibility and imagination. The work asks for craft. It also asks for completion.

"Your job is to complete the project,” says Neal Allen. “The final quality and consequences are not yet your business."

This week, we finished one of those projects ourselves: the page for our first recorded Radio Maine Live event, Emergence and Light, is now up. The audio came out rougher than we wanted, but our editing tools carried it most of the way, and the people who asked for the recording now have it. The page exists imperfectly and completely. That is the kind of finishing this book is about.

I have been thinking about the importance of completion as I organize years of published written pieces, radio interviews, and video conversations. Looking back on all that work, I am most pleased with the pieces I committed to and finished. They exist now as more than tasks checked off a list. They have become a living archive.

Some of those interviews are with people who have since passed. I can return to their voices, their faces, and their stories. The conversations feel even more poignant now. Their words still hold presence. Their stories still teach. Finishing, it turns out, does not simply close a project. Sometimes it preserves a life, a moment, a relationship, and a truth that later becomes more precious than we could have known.

Some projects grow like dandelions.

The construction projects around the islands have become a kind of spring reading. Some houses seem to move quickly because the team is ready, the weather cooperates, and the need feels immediate. Other projects wait. Maybe they belong to summer people, or the deadline lives farther out, or the work is waiting on a different kind of readiness.

Creative work often moves this way.

Some projects, like Bountiful Path, I pick up several times a week. They stay close to the surface, like fresh green grass after rain. Other projects belong to someone else’s timeline, like helping build an addition onto a structure already in motion. Then there are the larger works, the ones that feel less like a shed and more like an entirely new dwelling. Those can be harder to keep moving. They may matter deeply, yet somehow feel less urgent. They sit waiting for the season when I am ready to inhabit them.

Good Writing reminds us that craft grows over time. A sentence improves through attention, a voice strengthens through use, and collaboration asks us to bring our own rules while loosening our grip on them.

It also reminds us that perfectionism can look very much like discernment. The distinction can be confusing. The inner voice may say: start over, wait longer, keep polishing, make it better before you let anyone see it.

Lamott calls finishing a “subversive act” because the inner voice of perfectionism so often tells us not to. That felt true to me as a writer, and as someone who keeps trying to make meaningful work inside a full life.

Life and creativity, like that dandelion between the granite, find a way through pressure, weather, neglect, and delay.

That may be the best kind of spring lesson.

A true boat book?

Yes, though not in the quick-and-sunny sense.

Good Writing is a good boat book for the person who likes to read a few pages, look up at the water, and think about how a sentence might become cleaner and more alive.

It is a reminder that our creative structures do not have to emerge at the same pace.

Some are move-in ready, some still wear tarps, and some are dandelions, pushing through granite without waiting to be invited to bloom.

Why this may matter for you

If you are building something alongside another person, Good Writing offers questions worth pondering.

Whose voice is this sentence serving?

Whose rules are we keeping, breaking, or sharing?

What project are you ready to finish, even when the inner voice keeps telling you to start over?

When two voices are in the room, the page tends to get more honest, not less. The same is often true of a life.

Your turn

What are you reading this spring as things emerge unevenly around you? Are there creative projects in your life that feel green and urgent, and others still waiting for their season?

Leave a comment

Whether we are wearing our winter coats or enjoying summer-like sunshine, may we find joy in being and strength in doing. May we be like the dandelions who push through, no matter what obstacles we encounter.

✨ Thank you for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Just across the water from us on Littlejohn Island, the float at Madeleine Point on Cousins Island is in now. I noticed this while out running one day. That small sign of the season feels almost ceremonial. Our own island float still bobs in the mooring field, not yet attached to the dock.

Each day, I check on it while walking or running by.

It is the time of year when my book stack begins to shift. The light stays with us longer, and the sunsplashes appear in new places. Some days between work tasks, I pick up whatever I am reading and follow our small dogs, Shark and Newt, into the patch of sunlight where they have already settled.

Paula McLain’s Skylark came off the stack this week.

McLain’s writing drew me in first. Her metaphors hold light and shadow together. I found myself lingering over sentences, then returning to them.

The colors beneath the story

The novel moves between two eras in Paris, one in the seventeenth century and one under gathering wartime pressure, with the underground city beneath them binding the stories together. In the seventeenth-century chapter, Alouette is the daughter of a master dyer at the Gobelins.

Lately, I have been reading about the history of color, so I was delighted to stumble upon this storyline in Skylark. I had previously learned about dyers’ guilds, the class distinctions woven into who could wear which shades, and how difficult color once was to make.

Dyers had to coax pigment from roots, minerals, insects, plants, and time. Color was labor. It was trade. It was secrecy. It was status.

That world made Alouette’s story especially vivid to me. McLain does not use color simply as decoration. She understands that color has long carried meaning far beyond beauty. Who could make it, who could afford it, who could wear it, and who had to go without. Those questions were never only aesthetic. They were social and political too.

Alouette sees color not only as craft but also as freedom.

What lies below

The underground in Skylark felt familiar to me for a different reason.

Having spent time in the caves of Cayman Brac, I know that being underground changes your sense of time and attention. Stone recalibrates scale. Time and attention change as you move through darkness, stone on every side. McLain captures that feeling, describing the catacombs and tunnels beneath Paris.

I also went to Paris, years ago, and found that the city carries its history in its architecture, both above and below ground. The walls, the scale, and the endurance of the place still remind us of what has happened there. I was there before 2019, before the fire that would significantly damage the Notre-Dame Cathedral. History continues to unfold even as we live it.

What Skylark understands is that the underground is never only physical. Every city has what it displays proudly and what it tries to conceal. Every profession does too.

As a woman physician, I read the Salpêtrière passages with real discomfort. McLain does not look away from the abuse that female patients endured there. Medicine has always held brilliance alongside blindness. Institutions can heal, but they can also contain, label, dismiss, and erase. A novel like Skylark reminds me how important it is to keep looking for the person beneath the diagnosis, and for the human being beneath the institution.

From this week’s Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle

Our second Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle brought more voices into the room this week. My co-facilitator, Karen Longfellow, and I gathered with readers from Maine, North Carolina, Arizona, and Algeria.

In our circle, there is no assigned book, no homework, and no pressure to finish anything before arriving. What emerges instead is a conversation shaped by attention, curiosity, and whatever the readers would like us to know about the books they share.

In this session, three themes naturally surfaced.

The first began with Amy McNee’s We Need Your Art. This book sparked a conversation about creativity, imposter syndrome, and the necessity of stepping into one’s identity before anyone else offers permission. One reader spoke about how self-doubt often arrives at the very moment a person is closest to meaningful work. Another reflected on how often women have had to claim authority inwardly before the world was willing to acknowledge it outwardly.

The second centered on humble leadership. Having recently featured it here on The Bountiful Path, I brought Jennifer J. Merz’s Steadfast: Frances Perkins, Champion of Workers’ Rights, a children’s book that still manages to say something profound about public life. Frances Perkins did not confuse visibility with leadership. She kept showing up, year after year, as the work itself demanded.

My mother brought The Sea Captain’s Wife by Tilar J. Mazzeo, the true story of Mary Ann Patten, a nineteen-year-old who took command of a clipper ship after her husband became gravely ill rounding Cape Horn. Those stories opened into a larger conversation about women who express their strength through steadiness, endurance, and a refusal to leave the room when things become difficult.

The third theme encompassed war, witness, and the work of closing distance. Kristin Hannah’s The Women and The Nightingale entered the conversation alongside Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway. Together, these books raised questions about whose suffering becomes visible, whose stories remain peripheral. How books can bring readers closer to lives and histories they might otherwise never fully see.

Readers also shared Marie Bostwick’s The Book Club for Troublesome Women and Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Happy Land. It was a remarkable stack of virtual circle books. Art and courage. Friendship and feminism. Leadership without flourish. Histories buried and brought back into view.

Perhaps that is one reason Skylark felt so right for this particular week, even though it was Steadfast that I brought to the circle.

So many of the books in the room were asking some version of the same question:

What have we overlooked?

What have we hidden?

A boat book for deeper water

Skylark is not a light read. It is one to bring to a float on a quiet spring afternoon, when you are willing to give yourself fully to a story that asks for attention and gives beauty back in return.

It is one to savor in a sunspot.

Skylark offered histories of color, the enduring architecture of Paris, and that old familiar reminder that the truest things do not announce themselves from the street.

Your turn

What book are you reading right now that feels richer the deeper you go into it? Which book would you bring to a circle like this one?

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me. I always love hearing what is on your book pile, what you are still thinking about, and what stories have surprised you.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

The float is back near the dock on Littlejohn Island. Many of the moorings are in place nearby, waiting for the boats that will return in the next few weeks. The float, like the moorings and our patio furniture, has emerged from its winter storage, ready for summer guests.

I’m very much looking forward to enjoying many of the books that make it into these posts from our family’s little boat. Maybe while anchored near the Goslings. Maybe while motoring toward Cow Island. I’m also looking forward to the guests that will sit with me on warm June evenings.

For now, the waters near our island are like the starting line of the Boston Marathon this morning, with runners just beginning to gather. Still quiet, uncrowded. Volunteers already in place.

Having run the Boston Marathon before, and watched it many times, I’m familiar with the anticipation surrounding both it, and the brief but glorious Maine pleasure boating season.

For some families this is school vacation week, when work, home, and being away overlap in ways that can feel either disorienting or generous, depending on the day.

I found Adeline Knight during that same kind of overlap. We were on Cayman Brac for my husband’s amateur radio work, and I had brought enough reading material for the flight, but not for the days that followed. One morning, while completing some digital tasks, I opened the audiobook app to put something on in the background. Much of my computer work does not require focused attention, which leaves room for a voice in the room. Adeline Knight’s Mending Hearts appeared in the included catalog. I knew nothing about it.

Within twenty minutes of starting Mending Hearts, I was in Cornwall.

How these audiobooks came to me

Not long after beginning the first Adeline Knight audiobook, I had started Wild Hearts. This was quickly followed by Lonely Hearts Radio. I listened while running in the early morning heat. I listened one afternoon while sitting on the porch with a set of watercolors, painting loosely while the actors carried the story forward. Each book ran between four and a half and six and a half hours.

These are audio-only productions, not print books read aloud. Each is performed by a full cast of actors, with the vocal specificity that trained performers bring to dialogue. The characters arrive as spoken words first, not as descriptions on a page. With a full cast, the story is closer to radio theater than to reading.

Three places I have never been

Each book is set in a different place, and Knight uses the geography as more than backdrop.

Mending Hearts unfolds in Cornwall, a part of the world I have not yet visited, though the landscape has lived in my imagination since I first read Winston Graham’s Poldark series years ago. The story carries an art thread I found particularly compelling: characters who create new wearable pieces by making their mends visible. The repair becomes the design. The history of the garment is not hidden but honored, a philosophy that echoes the Japanese practice of kintsugi and the broader idea that damage, made visible, can become beautiful.

Wild Hearts moves through Lord Howe Island, off Australia’s east coast, another place I have not been. The nature writing is the draw here. The island’s ecology, its birds, and its geography become as much a part of the story as the characters who move through it. For anyone who pays attention to the natural world, this one rewards careful listening.

Lonely Hearts Radio is built around a late night radio show. Set in 1999, it taps into the intimacy of radio culture at the end of the last century. Before podcasts and streaming, there was the voice coming through a speaker late at night, choosing songs for strangers, reading letters on the air. Knight captures that feeling with precision.

What listening teaches

Audio-only books, the kind Knight writes, carry particular value for readers in this position. There is no print edition to feel secondary to. The performance is the text. The actors are the page.

Words put on paper, translated into digital format, whether read aloud by a single narrator or performed by a cast of ten, can reach a person in any of these forms. The vehicle changes. A story that arrives at the right moment matters more than the format it arrives in.

Knight’s audio-only books may suit you if you love a strong sense of place and character-driven stories, or if your days include stretches of work that keep the hands or eyes busy while leaving the ears free. Cooking, walking, driving, gardening, or the kind of screen work that runs on habit rather than concentration: all good listening conditions

What fiction carries home

I have had excellent teachers who employed timelines, maps, primary sources, and the full apparatus of formal instruction. Much of that knowledge held. Some of the most durable knowledge, though, arrived through characters who lived inside the periods my teachers described from the outside, through stories rather than textbooks.

Knight’s books are contemporary romance, not historical fiction, but they share the quality I value most in well-researched books: enough specific detail about a place, a profession, a way of living that I come away knowing something I did not know before. Cornish textile traditions. The ecology of Lord Howe Island. The mechanics of running a late-night radio show. For someone who learns by hearing stories, this kind of fiction is one of the most effective ways to travel without leaving the room.

All three are warm-climate listens in the best sense: absorbing, well-paced, carried by strong character development and sharp dialogue. I finished all three in less than a week on Cayman Brac and came home to Maine with the feeling of having traveled to three places beyond the one I had actually visited.

True boat books

These audiobooks fit the spirit of Books on the Boat in a way I did not expect when I started listening to the first one. True boat books, all three: portable, absorbing, light enough for a run or an afternoon with watercolors, and rich enough to carry home afterward. They travel well.

Tomorrow evening, on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, the Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle will gather for its spring edition. No homework. No requirement to have finished anything. Bring one of the Hearts Series if you have listened to any of them, or bring whatever you are reading right now. If you have listened to any of Adeline Knight’s books, bring the line that stayed.

Your turn:

Have you found that listening to a story changes what you take from it? And is there a place you have traveled to only through someone else's voice?

Leave a comment

Spring is fully here on Littlejohn Island. The runners of the 2026 Boston Marathon have finished today’s race. The watercolors from that afternoon in Cayman Brac are on my desk, the washes dried into the paper. I came back from our southern island adventure with three stories I did not plan to hear, and a sense of having visited four places, while on a trip to one.

The mooring field outside will fill in the next few weeks, each buoy claiming its boat. The channel is ready. The boats will follow.

Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

© 2026 Dr. Lisa Belisle. All rights reserved.

Back on Littlejohn Island, the morning temperatures are barely nudging the freezing mark, but by midday a hardy soul is out mowing her lawn. The steady groan of the engine is a welcome reminder that warmer days are not far off.

Both my husband and I have the freedom to work from places that feed the soul while still earning our keep. On a recent trip, I read West with Giraffes on a plane to Virginia.

My mother loaned me her copy of the book she had purchased at the suggestion of a friend. The corners were worn soft by the time I tucked it into my carry-on. Sometimes these are the best books of all: well loved, and vouched for by the readers who came before.

We had flown south for my husband’s work, returned to Maine, then quickly turned around for several days with his family. This is always a quiet privilege: stepping into a labyrinth of heritage that other people have already walked into shape. I write about my own family often, because they have shaped me and continue to do so.

Our families, inherited or chosen, frequently form the center of the life labyrinth that curls around us as the years accumulate. They are part of our overall context, and the backdrop to the stories we inhabit. Whatever story we embrace moving forward, they have a tendency to keep us company as we go.

Being inside someone else’s living, breathing context for a few days is like following them into their labyrinth. You get to be the guest. The pattern is theirs to share.

A 1938 novel built on a true story

Lynda Rutledge’s West with Giraffes opens with a hurricane off the East Coast and two surviving giraffes bound for the San Diego Zoo. Rutledge tells it through the memory of Woodrow Wilson Nickel, an old man looking back on the seventeen-year-old Dust Bowl farm boy who signed on for the cross-country drive out of desperation. He comes out the other side a different person.

Rutledge did not invent most of it. In September 1938, the SS Robin Goodfellow sailed into the Great New England Hurricane carrying two young Ugandan giraffes named Patches and Lofty. Belle Benchley, then the first female zoo director in the world, had paid for them. After the animals survived the hurricane and a quarantine in Athenia, New Jersey, they were trucked across the country in a custom International D-40 truck and arrived at the San Diego Zoo on October 17, 1938.

Lofty and Patches lived at the zoo for nearly thirty years. Lynda Rutledge first found that history while doing nonfiction work for the San Diego Zoo, and she carried it inside her for years before writing the novel. The stories we end up making into something are usually the ones that have been making us into something first.

A Steinbeck shelf in the back of my mind

When I started this novel, the words beneath the prose felt familiar in a way I could not place at first.

I was a few chapters in before my middle-school-reader self woke up and recognized the terrain. John Steinbeck was one of my earliest writer heroes, beginning when I read The Grapes of Wrath in seventh grade. I went on to read every one of his books I could find.

The Grapes of Wrath came out in 1939, one year after Patches and Lofty rolled into San Diego. The same rough road west, the same hopeful traffic moving toward California. The Joad family went on foot and in a beaten truck. Two giraffes went in a custom International. Both arrivals bent toward the same coast.

I had walked this same stretch of American road with the Joads. Now I was walking it again with seventeen-year-old Woody and two giraffes.

Jane Dahmen

The labyrinth behind the inn

Where we were staying in Virginia there was an actual walking labyrinth just down the hill from the main building. I hadn’t noticed it on earlier visits, or perhaps it was new. One afternoon I went out for a walk and found it laid out on the grass. Rocks stacked on gravel, with lawn on three sides. The woods alive with birdsong not far beyond. This labyrinth was its own version of a bountiful path, which I find hard to avoid.

Unlike a maze, a labyrinth has one winding path that leads to the middle and back out again. You cannot get lost. The point is not to solve a labyrinth like a puzzle. The point is arriving.

My family is largely Celtic and French, and both sides would have known some version of the labyrinth. My Celtic ancestors may have known the carved stones at Newgrange, the Irish passage tomb that was already ancient when the pyramids were new; later read as the soul’s path between worlds. My French ancestors may have walked Chartres, where medieval pilgrims who could not reach Jerusalem traced the cathedral’s 42-foot stone labyrinth on their knees, the center standing in for the Holy City.

On both sides, the teaching is the same: going the long way around is the point.

This is why I keep thinking about labyrinths as a doctor. In narrative medicine, we sometimes say that a person’s illness lives in the story they tell about themselves, long before it lives in the chart. You cannot chart-note your way to the heart of that. You have to walk it with them, the way a Chartres pilgrim once walked toward the heart of God on her knees, trusting a route she could not see the end of.

The line that marked the week

Near the end of the novel, Woodrow speaks to a younger listener about first stories.

Woody begins as a boy from the Dust Bowl: orphaned, angry, alone. The cross-country drive to San Diego does not erase him. By the time the truck reaches the zoo, the first version of him is still there. It is not the only one.

A first story is not a life sentence.

Earlier in the book, Rutledge gives Woodrow another line that resonates, particularly for those of us who spend time in clinical rooms:

Many of us relish the specific pleasure of reading while traveling. Pulling out a new book in an unfamiliar location lets the book and the place move with and through us at the same time. On Radio Maine and in The Bountiful Path on Radio Maine, we return often to how the stories we carry shape the rooms we walk into. Books do this for us naturally.

Sometimes these are rooms we know very well. Sometimes these are rooms we’ve yet to visit.

Books on the Boat and the Spring Book Circle

West with Giraffes belongs to the spirit of Books on the Boat: readable in the “between spaces,” whether you are anchored in your favorite cove, or crossing a continent. It holds space for travels both external and internal, and returns us to the center of the labyrinth we are each walking.

If you’d like company while traveling, in the literary sense, the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle is meeting soon, and West with Giraffes may find its way onto the table. If you have read it, bring your first story. If you have not, the paperback is short and the corners get soft fast.

The book goes back to my mother this week. It was hers to lend, not mine to keep, and that feels right for a novel about things that move hand to hand. Patches and Lofty reached San Diego on October 17, 1938. Woodrow reached the rest of his life. I came back to Maine with a few sentences tucked into the margin of the week.

Your turn:

What books have traveled with you, to destinations far or near? Have they returned you to your center, or shown you something you hadn’t seen before?

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Mud season, birthday season

March in Maine is a changeable experience. It comes with thaw, soft ground, damp sneakers, and the invitation to step outside anyway.

Yesterday morning we were treated to clusters of snowflakes collecting on the granite banks of Littlejohn Island. By the afternoon, a run on Cousins Island took me past a garrulous cluster of skateboarding teens and trio of children bouncing on a now-dry trampoline.

As we welcome the spring equinox (and celebrate my brother’s birthday) here on Casco Bay, I find myself honoring youthful exuberance and reaching for two children’s books: Mud, Sand, and Snow by Charlotte Agell and Wander Out Wonder In by -Lustine. These books feel especially appropriate given that our grandbaby celebrated her first birthday this past week.

Each year around this time, I think of poet E. E. Cummings’s unforgettable “mud-luscious” and “puddle-wonderful” language, which captures the gleeful energy of this in Just- spring season so well.

Readers of Books on the Boat may already suspect that I love children’s books. Put something beautiful in front of a child, something rhythmic, colorful, and alive, and curiosity often does the rest. A page can become a doorway. A few words can open an entire world.

That line from Charlotte Agell’s book reached straight into my memories. Spring has always felt that way: immediate and earthy, full of movement and mischief and joy.

As a child, I spent long hours on the family swing set in Orange Park, Florida, just outside the Jacksonville Naval Air Station where my father was completing his family medicine training as a military physician. I loved trying to touch the clouds with my Keds, powering my pendulum-ascent with an unending succession of shared-out-loud songs and stories.

That feeling of lift, of motion, and of spring giddiness rising up through the body still lives in me.

Brian Emerson

Two books that open the senses

Mud, Sand, and Snow carries extra meaning because Charlotte Agell is not only a beloved Maine author and educator, but someone I have had the pleasure of knowing through my work in media and writing, and through my children’s school years. She inspired them, and so many other young people, toward creativity. This book does the same. Its bright, playful illustrations and seasonal movement invite children to notice the world with delight.

I’ve always thought that one of the best ways to intrigue children is to introduce them to beauty on their own terms, whether through art created by humans or by the non-human creations of nature. I am still as much an beauty-outside person as a beauty-inside one. While I no longer have a swing set readily available, I enjoy running, walking, exploring the woods, and paying attention to what each season offers. That is part of why Agell’s book feels so true. It understands the muddy joy of spring, the tickle of summer, the turning of fall, and the hush of winter.

Emily Ennulat-Lustine’s Wander Out Wonder In offers that same invitation through a different visual and verbal language. The sensory words make the natural world feel close enough to touch. Ennulat-Lustine’s illustrations emerged through hand-pulled collagraphs, a printmaking process that gives the pages a distinctive beauty. As someone who speaks with artists, writes about art, and plays with art herself, I am always drawn to work that crosses forms and invites us to see more closely.

For our first grandbaby

Emily’s question feels especially relevant to me this week.

Emily dedicates her book to her parents. One of them is a father who saw the greatest beauty in the tiniest of details. I felt a kinship immediately. My own father was very much that kind of person. He cherished sharing the outdoors with his children and grandchildren. He would have loved reading this book to his great-granddaughter.

It is hard for me to separate the birth of our granddaughter a year ago from the passing of my father almost two years ago. His final spring still lives in me through sensory memory. Even as his illness changed so much, his noticing remained. He named beauty. He paid attention.

One small moment stays with me. After surgery, while he was in a rehabilitation facility and losing more and more of his ability to process the world and communicate in the ways he once had, he noticed a spring coat I was wearing and realized it was new. My father never seemed especially interested in fashion, which made his compliment about the coat all the more touching. So much else was slipping away, yet he still saw me. He still noticed detail. He still found a way to offer that act of loving attention.

That way of being in the world feels close to these books, and close to what I hope we pass on to children: a sense that the world is alive, textured, worthy of wonder.

This is one of the quiet gifts of children’s literature. It is not only for children. It returns adults to presence. It reminds us to look, to listen, to feel, to stay curious. That is one reason these books feel so right for Books on the Boat this week. They invite us to interact with the wider world, with our own hearts, with nature, and with those we love.

Why this may matter to you right now

This time of year asks many of us to hold more than one feeling at once. Spring brings delight, though it also stirs memory. A child’s birthday can open the heart even wider to those we miss. These books meet that tender place with gentleness. They remind us that noticing is its own form of steadiness: mud underfoot, wind in the grasses, a child’s question, the small detail someone we love still sees.

In my recent Radio Maine solo episode, “Getting Reoriented,” I reflected on the small recalibrations that help us return to what matters. These books offer that same wisdom in a gentler key. They do not ask us to escape life. They ask us to enter it more fully, with wonder.

These are true boat books, though not only for the boat. They belong on a lap, on a porch, tucked into a tote bag for a spring outing, or read aloud before naptime after a day outside. They are books for a child just beginning to meet the seasons, and for the rest of us learning, once again, how to notice them.

📚Your Turn

What children’s books have stayed with you over the years? Which ones opened the world for your children, your grandchildren, or for you?

Leave a comment

This week, I am grateful for the artists and writers who help us pause. I am grateful for a grandchild’s first birthday. I am grateful for the way joy and memory travel together, and for books that make room for both.

That instinct to notice, to mark what each season offers, and to pay attention as an act of love, is something I have been turning over for a long time. It has become the foundation of something we are building here on the Bountiful Path.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

P.S. Something has been taking shape quietly on The Bountiful Path this season, rooted in the same instinct these books carry: that paying attention to the natural world, and to our own inner seasons, is not a luxury. It is a way of being alive. A new online course and a series of seasonal reflection toolkits are coming soon, beginning with one for spring and shaped by the five-element framework of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Subscribers will receive an early preview.

In the meantime, we invite you to listen to our recent solo episode, “Getting Reoriented,” from The Bountiful Path | A Radio Maine Series for a companion reflection on noticing drift, tending what matters, and making small, meaningful course corrections.

Join us for the Spring Virtual Book Circle

If these books, or this season, have stirred something in you, we would love to read alongside you.

Spring can feel like a threshold, with longer light, softer air, and the slow, steady work of thawing. We invite you to gather with us in that in-between space for the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle on April 21.

No assigned book. Bring whatever you are reading right now, or choose a title that resonates from past Books on the Boat posts. If you would like to loosely connect your reading to the season, consider a book that helps you notice renewal, creativity, resilience, or change.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

🎧 A 45-second reflection on the long game, and the slow work of tending what matters.

This week’s audio reflection sits alongside a recent solo episode from The Bountiful Path | A Radio Maine Series, exploring the quiet work of tending what matters over time.

A long game celebrated

March in Maine rarely reveals everything at once. More ground appears as the snow melts away, which is certainly welcome. Still, this is not the lush ground of June or July. What emerges first is worn, and uneven. The grass shows itself the way New England skin does in early spring: pale, tender, and only just beginning to remember the sun. Every rough patch is visible. Every flaw stands in the open air.

That feels appropriate for this particular book.

Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction is a book about writing, though it also carries larger life lessons. The phrase the long game usually refers to choosing patience over quick reward, steady effort over shortcuts, and a deeper outcome over immediate gratification. An author and well-regarded writing instructor with ties to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, McCracken applies that idea to fiction, though her wisdom reaches beyond the page.

This is a book about craft, endurance, and how to keep faith with work that takes time. It is also about tending something slowly enough for it to grow.

Those of us who have been writing since we could first jot notes on a page will find this concept relatable. The craft of creative practice requires nurturing. It asks for discipline and tenderness at once. It is rife with contradictions. McCracken understands that.

One reason this book is so compelling is that it is written in short, bite-size sections, yet never slips into rigid instruction. McCracken does not pretend there is one sanctioned route to becoming a writer. She says, in effect: try this. Then know there are times not to. Learn the forms. Learn the rules. Then understand that no rule is holy.

I read this book a few sections at a time each morning rather than straight through, as a way of savoring McCracken’s suggestions and gently nudging my own creative process awake. That rhythm suited the book beautifully. It is the kind of book that reads well when met with attention rather than haste.

Joyce Grasso

Notes from the thaw

I have enjoyed many books on writing over the years. Stephen King’s On Writing has stayed with me. So have Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. I also value the cleaner, less narrative-minded precision of Strunk and White. Even so, I am always drawn to books on writing that remember a writer is a person, not merely a machine for producing pages.

McCracken belongs with King, Lamott, and Goldberg in that way. She gives enough of herself to humanize the practice of writing fiction, though never so much that the book turns inward and forgets the reader. Her intelligence is sharp. Her tone is companionable. Her wit keeps the pages lively. Her refusal to oversimplify makes the book more trustworthy.

That passage alone carries more than advice for writers. It speaks to anyone living inside an unfinished season; anyone waiting for some cleaner, greener version of life to begin.

March teaches the same lesson. The ground does not wait to become beautiful before it becomes visible.

The humane practice of making art

One of the sections that struck me most was McCracken’s comparison of writing workshops to Tough Mudders. Her point is bracing and wise. Difficulty is part of creative life. Humiliation does not need to be.

I have been in classes and workshops. I have received critique over the years that helped me grow. I have also seen how punishing some teaching environments can become, as though cruelty were proof of seriousness. McCracken rejects that false equation.

I do too.

Many years of parenting, coaching, practicing, and teaching in medicine have shown me that humiliation is a terrible tool for education. It may get a result. It may even get a quick result. Still, it leaves damage behind. There are better ways to teach people. There are better ways to call them toward rigor. Those ways may take longer. They may require more care, more patience, and more imagination. They may be, in the fullest sense, part of a long game.

Creativity itself is demanding enough. To bring something into the light that did not exist in this form before is vulnerable work. Birthing a story, a painting, a new idea, even a new self-understanding, can be arduous. The finished thing may delight. The labor should never be underestimated. The work should never be crushed merely to prove that someone can survive being crushed.

That insight reaches far beyond writing workshops. It belongs to teaching, parenting, medicine, leadership, and art. It belongs anywhere one human being is entrusted with helping another grow.

Time, memory, humor

Another reason this book stayed with me is that McCracken understands how layered our inner lives are. Writers do not arrive at the page as blank slates. Neither do readers. Neither do physicians. Neither do teachers.

Every patient encounter contains the present moment, though it also gathers memory, fear, tenderness, prior losses, and hopes for repair. That is true in medicine. It is true in relationships. It is true in narrative medicine. It is true in fiction. We never stand in only one timeline.

McCracken also defends humor in a way I loved.

That feels deeply true, and true as well to so many artists, writers, and Radio Maine guests whose work carries wit and sorrow in the same vessel. Humor does not diminish seriousness. Often it is one of the most human ways we survive it.

Why this may matter to you

Even if you are not writing fiction, this book may matter because so much of it is really about how we live with effort, uncertainty, criticism, and becoming.

It is about making room now for the work that calls to us.

It is about learning without being humiliated.

It is about recognizing that humor and grief often travel together.

It is about understanding that the deepest forms of growth are rarely immediate, tidy, or externally impressive at first.

For anyone building a creative life, healing from harsh forms of teaching, tending a meaningful practice, or trying to remain human while making something real, A Long Game offers wise company.

A true boat book for writers and readers

This is very much a boat book, though not in the light-and-breezy sense alone. It is easy to dip into for a few pages at a time. The sections are compact. The voice is lively. The wisdom accumulates quietly. It sends us back to our own work and our own lives with clearer eyes.

McCracken also offers practical reminders that matter on the sentence level, not only the soul level:

That clarity is part of what makes the book so useful. It is thoughtful without becoming vague. It is literary without becoming precious. It is generous without becoming sentimental.

For anyone interested in the craft of writing, I would highly recommend A Long Game. For anyone interested in the larger work of making a creative life, I would recommend it just as strongly. This is a book about fiction. It is also a book about patience, courage, attention, and the kind of humane rigor that helps people make something real.

📚Your Turn

What are you reading in this season of thaw? Are you reaching for books that nourish, books that challenge, or books that send you back to your own creative life with an open heart?

Leave a comment

Until next time…

May we notice what is thawing, both on the ground beneath us and in the lives we are shaping.
May we keep faith with the long game.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

Join us for the Spring Virtual Book Circle

Awaken to the energy of spring and spend an evening with fellow readers who want companionship without homework.

Spring can feel like a threshold, with longer light, softer air, and the slow, steady work of thawing. We invite you to gather with us in that in-between space for the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle on April 21

No assigned book. Bring whatever you are reading right now, or choose a title that resonates from past Books on the Boat posts. If you would like to loosely connect your reading to the season, consider a book that helps you notice renewal, creativity, resilience, or change.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Shoulder Month, Shoulder Stories

March brings mixed conditions. The calendar points us closer to spring, yet in Maine the ground is still mostly obscured by snow.

This week began with a full moon and a total lunar eclipse accenting our frozen island trails.

Traditional names for March’s full moon align with what the landscape shows right now. Worm Moon refers to early signs of life returning. Other names point to what people watch and do at this time of year, including Sugar-Making Moon and Sap Moon, tied to maple sap rising.

This significance is not lost on our neighbors, who have been putting out collection buckets as the warming sun coaxes tree-sweetness to the surface.

Each month, the full moon carries a lesson in regional and cultural interpretation, and March is no exception. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, it is popularly called Worm Moon, as noted, in recognition of thawing soil and the return of earthworms, beetle larvae, and grubs. Others name what winter leaves behind, like the Snow Crust Moon (or Hard Crust on the Snow Moon) for days that soften snow, and nights that refreeze it. Some traditions call it the Sore Eye Moon for the sharp glare of sunlight on late-season snow, or the Wind Moon (and Moon of Winds) for the blustery weather that often comes with shifting temperatures.

The moon stays the same. The names change, shaped by geography, livelihood, memory, and what a culture has learned to watch for.

That range of names mirrors the reading experience in Good People. The novel turns on how different observers can look at the same family, the same event, the same set of facts, and come away with entirely different meanings. Context selects the details that feel important. Belief determines what counts as evidence. The book’s many voices make that visible, then leave the reader to hold the tension.

Good People is rife with this tension, and stayed with me for this reason, as well as for its subject, its structure, and its insistence on perspective.

Heidi Daub

What This Novel Holds

Good People follows the Sharaf family, refugees from Afghanistan who build a prosperous life in an exclusive Northern Virginia neighborhood over the course of two decades. Impacted by the military conflict in their home country, the parents want safety and possibility for their children. They also want continuity with their community and values. That push and pull becomes the heart of the novel: how to belong without erasing yourself.

An unthinkable tragedy strikes the family and the story turns into a public reckoning. Rumor competes with loyalty. Outsiders judge what they don’t completely understand. Insiders argue about what matters most. The book carries, at its core, questions about honor, culture, and how women’s lives become the battleground for morality and reputation.

A Chorus of Vignettes, A Practice in Listening

Sabit writes in short vignettes that read like interviews. The voices arrive one at a time, each offering testimony from a different vantage point. The effect resembles standing in shifting light. We begin to feel certain, then the next voice changes the shape of what we think we know.

The book’s structure creates a particular kind of reading experience. It requires patience. It pays off through accumulation. It avoids the tidy comfort of a single story.

March often puts contradictions side by side: thaw and crust, sap buckets and snowpack. This novel asks a similar kind of attention.

This will feel familiar to you if you’ve had the experience of living inside competing expectations, or trying to understand a story that keeps changing depending on who speaks.

Bountiful Path Resonance

In medicine, we practice perspective-taking every day, and still we fall short. We interpret symptoms, decisions, and silence through our own training, our own assumptions, and our own inherited lens. Culture can look like a set of “facts” from the outside. From the inside, it lives as memory, obligation, protection, pride, fear, and love.

Reading Good People reinforced how difficult it can be to understand a worldview you have not lived. The novel’s power also comes from authorship. Sabit draws on the lived knowledge of displacement and the long work of belonging. That vantage shapes what the book can hold. Nothing in these pages excuses harm. The story presents complexity and leaves the reader to sit with the human costs of collision.

Boat Book Verdict + An Invitation

This is a deeper-water boat book: propulsive, thoughtfully structured, and emotionally heavy. I wouldn’t pair it with a crowded dock or a distracted afternoon. I would pair it with quiet, with time, and with a willingness to be changed by what you hear.

This book fits March in the truest sense. It sits in the tension between what we inherit and what we attempt; between the wish to belong and the need to remain ourselves.

Outside, sap buckets and snowpack share the same yard.

Above, a full moon can darken into eclipse and then brighten again.

📚Your Turn

What book has shifted your perspective lately, one that made you reconsider what you thought you understood?

What are you reading as March begins to tilt, almost imperceptibly, toward spring?

Leave a comment

If you’d like some gentle reading companionship this season, we invite you to join the Bountiful Path Spring Virtual Book Circle on April 21. There’s no assigned book and no homework. Bring whatever you’re reading right now, or choose a title you’ve seen in past Books on the Boat posts. We’ll share short passages, brief reflections, and plenty of listening space.

I’ll be co-facilitating this second edition of our seasonal Virtual Book Circle series with Karen Longfellow (nurse practitioner, yoga instructor, Navy veteran, and longtime Maine Adaptive volunteer). There’s no cost to join, you don’t need to be a paid subscriber, and you can come just this once or return as life allows.

This March, may we each make space for what’s changing slowly, the way sap collects one drop at a time.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Winter is a special season in our family: three of our six adult children celebrate birthdays within the space of a month. Having began the trifecta of revelry with our digital nomad daughter in Maine, and feted our Valentine Day’s child in Savannah, we are rounding out this year’s festivities with our son in Vermont.

This weekend we are staying at a place near Lake Champlain, close enough to run the shoreline and see the ice stacked and splintered at the edge. The lake feels familiar and unfamiliar at once. It carries more depth and less motion than the water near our island in Maine. The wind arrives colder, sweeping in long bands that sting the face and wake the body.

I return to an important part of my history every time I come back here.

I am the only child of my large family of origin born in Burlington, where my parents lived while my father attended medical school at the University of Vermont. Years later, I returned to attend the same medical school, and gave birth to my son in the midst of my own studies. He was the only one of his siblings born here. That symmetry delights me every time we come back.

Places become significant in our lives, receding and reappearing when we least expect them.

Following medical school, I experienced another Burlington chapter when I completed a leadership-focused online MBA through Champlain College, after years away from the classroom. Great teachers anchored that experience. Younger classmates challenged my assumptions and widened my view. Learning keeps its door open when we keep showing up.

Why This Book, Right Now

The Secret Lives of Color is like our other February picks, Kitchen Table Wisdom, The Serviceberry, and The Greatest Sentence Ever Written— each books that offer insight in small bites, honoring the brevity yet importance of this month.

St. Clair structures the book as a reference. Each color gets a short entry, often just a few pages. We can read one color at a time at the kitchen counter, or beside a winter window. We can dip in for five minutes and still leave with something worth holding.

My husband and I first learned about The Secret Lives of Color while visiting Portland Art Gallery artist Greg Day in his studio. We noticed stacks of reference books everywhere, and that detail fit him. Greg brings deep study into his work. He learns across modalities, including his earlier life in architecture.

The Secret Lives of Color belongs not only in a studio, but also on the nightstand or in the boat bag of anyone who has ever wondered about our visual understanding of the world.

Amaranth and the Pleasure of Precision

St. Clair writes about pigments and materials that came from minerals, plants, metals, and insects. Some sources, like those based in lead and mercury, carried toxicity. As a physician, I read those pages with extra attention. Beauty often exacts a price.

St. Clair traces the cultural life of color as well. People elevate and restrict colors. People assign meaning, then revise it. People fight over who gets to wear what.

St. Clair also gives us the part I love most. She gives us names, and she shows us the hue. Viridian. Cobalt. Amaranth. Dutch orange. The specificity feels like returning to a childhood crayon box, except now the words come with history.

Naming matters in writing. Descriptive naming pulls us closer to the real thing. A precise word helps us see more clearly. Labels can flatten. Description can open.

The color amaranth offers one example. I first met amaranth as an integrative physician focused on healthy foods. I was intrigued by this protein-rich grain once cultivated by the Aztecs. Later, I came to know amaranth as a feathery flower, plush and vivid. It is not surprising that artists would admire the color.

We live by what we notice. We live by what we name. We also live by what we miss.

Why This May Matter for You

The Secret Lives of Color offers a small, practical reset. It trains attention.

If winter has narrowed your world to errands and screens, read one color entry and look up. If you write, teach, lead, or parent, you already work with perception all day long. St. Clair strengthens the muscle of specificity. She reminds us that “blue” never means only blue, and “orange” never means only orange. That mindset supports better language, better listening, and more humane leadership.

This also connects to narrative medicine. Stories change when we name accurately. Healing often begins when someone finds the right words.

Boat Book as Invitation

The Secret Lives of Color welcomes the life we actually live. A few pages at a time. Multiple settings. Small openings of wisdom, like our other brief February reads, just delivered through color.

📚Your Turn

What are you reading as February closes? Any books that help you notice more clearly, or name more precisely?

Leave a comment

This weekend holds so many returns: to Burlington, to family milestones, to the lake that shaped my earliest chapters. St. Clair’s pages offer another kind of return, back to names and the precision that helps a writer stay honest. When I call a color by its true name, I feel my mind slow down and my heart settle into the moment.

You may notice our next piece in your mailbox or feed on a new schedule, and sooner than usual. We are building something new for you, and look forward to sharing it soon.

Until then…

May the place you came from offer you something simple and sustaining.

May the words you choose bring you closer to what you mean,

and may your noticing guide you gently home.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

The Muddy Middle

We are now closer to March than February, and the Maine landscape reflects that truth. Snow and mud mingle along the street margins. The dogs regularly stop to sniff at newly uncovered scents on their walks.

The weekend snowstorm may drop a few inches, yet this time of year the accumulation rarely stays long.

This abbreviated month is perfect for another smaller book, similar to last week’s The Serviceberry.

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson is a thought-provoking read, easily completed.

I gave this book to my husband for Valentine’s Day because he, like me, loves words both written and spoken. Words as direction. Words as shelter. Words as spark.

Isaacson takes one line from the Declaration of Independence and turns it slowly in his hands, like beach glass held up to the light.

While I have read that sentence countless times over the years, Isaacson’s book prompted me to pay particular attention.

Young hands, heavy words

I finished this book while we were in Savannah, enjoying the softer southern winter light. The words came with me while walking and running the city’s historic streets. A place where enslaved people and their owners once coexisted. A place where it is impossible to forget where we, as a nation, came from.

Isaacson points us toward the hard work of finding shared ground again.

One detail brought forward by Isaacson surprised me: how young so many of the people shaping these founding ideas were. Thomas Jefferson was 33 when he wrote the Declaration. John Adams was 40. Benjamin Franklin, the outlier, carried the elder’s gravity at 70.

Thirty-three.

I think about being that age and remember how much I did and did not know. I think about the wisdom and passion of our adult children who are now almost as old as Jefferson at that juncture.

I consider the weight of the words Jefferson wrote, and how the ink had to hold not only a sentence, but a future. I picture the courage and the audacity. I picture the fear, too, even if history rarely lingers there.

Youth wasn’t the only striking detail. The room was narrow. Women weren’t there. Indigenous voices weren’t invited. Enslaved people weren’t there to speak for themselves. The ‘we’ on the page came before the ‘we’ in real life.

I’m less interested in venerating the men than in noticing what the sentence attempted, and who was left out of its first draft.

Isaacson’s Franklin shows up here for me not as a marble statue, but as someone wary of a world that crowns the “best and brightest” and forgets the rest.

That line about “true merit” feels like a lantern for our own moment, and for every leader trying to widen opportunity instead of narrowing it.

While still in Savannah, my husband and I walked Wormsloe State Historic Site with our adult daughter and her husband. We moved down that famous avenue of live oaks, Spanish moss hanging like soft fringe over the road, as more than one Valentine’s Day couple celebrated a recent marital engagement with a photo shoot.

Wormsloe brings us to history the way so many places do: through what remains. Ruins made of tabby. Marsh trails. Archeologists and museum curators working from fragments, offering an honest effort to understand where people were coming from.

The remnants do not tell the complete picture. Remnants rarely do. Still, access to remnants matters. Evidence matters. Attempts matter. Walking there together, we felt the humility of partial records, and the hope inside the act of trying.

Jodi Edwards

Words are never “just semantics”

A colleague in leadership once said to me, kindly, that something we were working hard to craft in response to a proposed health system change was “just semantics.” The insinuation was that the process could be made more efficient by moving quickly through the crafting of our communication. Respect for my colleague still lives in that memory. Disagreement lives there, too.

Semantics is not “just.” Words are how we make meaning together. Words become the bridge between a leader’s intent and our team’s lived reality. Words can widen the circle of belonging, or shrink it to a gate.

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written made me think about a country trying to get on the same page before it took the next step. A country that, at a relatively young age compared to others, even now struggles to find unity. One sentence as a shared plank. One sentence as a handhold. A sentence as a promise that can be argued with, expanded, and, over time, made more true.

Common ground. Two plain words. Two difficult words.

Liberty on paper, life in practice

Here’s the rub Isaacson’s “great sentence” brings into sharp relief: some of the very people who spoke so beautifully about liberty still participated in slavery.

That contradiction is hard. It should be hard.

Wormsloe carried that same tension in a different register. Beauty and brutality can share the same ground. A site can preserve an elegant lane of oaks while also pressing us to ask: Who labored here? Who benefited? Who had choices, and who had none?

Part of living honestly with history is resisting the easy move, either polishing the founders into saints or flattening them into villains. They lived inside the context of their time. Their words reached beyond their time. Their lives, in many cases, failed their own ideals.

I’m not reaching for sainthood here. I’m reaching for the gap between ideals and lived practice, because that gap still shapes our democracy — and our leadership — today.

The tension matters to me as a leadership lesson, not a lecture: the gap between what we say we believe and what we actually build. The gap between the values we print on paper and the choices we make when nobody applauds.

The commons, the fence, and the cost of enclosure

The other conversation this book sparked at our kitchen table surprised me with its staying power: the commons, the enclosure laws in Europe, and what it means to draw boundaries around resources. What gets protected. What gets restricted. Who gets left standing outside the fence line.

That word, enclosure, lands heavily. Enclosure is both physical and linguistic. Language can fence people out. Language can fence possibility in.

Fences are not automatically cruel. Plenty of family farms rely on them. A fence can keep deer out of winter greens. A fence can keep livestock safe. A fence can protect the very produce and animals that make survival possible. Stewardship often needs a boundary. A fence can be the difference between a harvest and hunger.

The rub shows up right there.

Sometimes we need fences. The questions are how and when they get used, and to what extent. Who decides where the fence goes. Who gets a key. Who gets told the fence is “for the good of everyone,” while the benefits flow in one direction.

This is where my husband, our daughter, and I brought our own history to the conversation, because all three of us have Irish roots. The word enclosure does not stay theoretical for long when your family story includes land, hunger, and departure.

In Ireland, the tightening of land into fewer hands squeezed small farmers and narrowed what families could grow and rely on. Diets tightened. Risk concentrated. When potato blight arrived, it struck a population already made more vulnerable by scarcity and dependence.

My great-grandparents emigrated from Ireland to South Boston at the beginning of the last century, carried forward by the famine’s long shadow and the aftershocks of loss. That is how a policy can become a suitcase. That is how a fence can become an ocean crossing.

Enclosure may work well for those who can benefit from it. Enclosure can look like order, progress, improvement. Enclosure can also become a quiet disaster for those forced outside of it. This is personal for me, and it is also painfully broad.

Many Indigenous communities, here and elsewhere, know enclosure not as a metaphor, but as policies that narrowed access to land, language, ceremony, and self-determination. When we talk about “the commons,” we are also talking about who gets to name it, who gets to keep it, and who pays when it disappears.

Isaacson keeps returning to balance, to the art of steadying opposing forces without trying to “win” at all costs.

This is where my mind kept circling back to last week’s boat read, and Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s insistence on abundance and reciprocity; on nourishment that grows when it moves through the community. The commons as a living practice, not a theory. Reciprocity as a kind of civic health.

A February boat book

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written is perfect for the short month of February: an afternoon read that keeps echoing long after the cover closes. Some boat books are page-turners that feel like salt air, tangy and ephemeral. This one feels like a compass, small, bright, insistent.

Common ground cannot mean asking those who have been harmed to pretend harm did not happen. Common ground asks for truth spoken clearly enough that we can choose what to do next. Common ground isn’t compliance. It’s a commitment to reality, and to expanding the circle of who gets protected by the words we say we believe.

📚Your Turn

What’s a sentence, one line, that has stayed with you for years? Has a family story ever changed the way you hear a “policy” word like commons, enclosure, liberty, or merit?

Leave a comment

If you read this one on the water, you might find yourself looking up more often than usual, at the horizon, at the shoreline, at the people you’re trying to lead and love, and asking a question that is both civic and personal:

What truths do we want to hold together, and where are we still living short of them?

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

A February Weekend, Southern Style

Suitcases on the bed. A flight booked out of Maine’s PWM. A calendar cleared. Those choices rarely show up on Valentine’s cards, yet they are love in plain clothes. Traveling to be with our adult children means offering the one thing no one can manufacture: presence. It means showing up without multitasking, listening without rushing, and letting shared time do its quiet work.

Savannah gives the day a different backdrop. Transported from our Littlejohn Island winter, our morning runs take place over cobblestones. We’ve walked the city streets with our daughter and son-in-law enjoying live oaks overhead and Spanish moss shifting in the breeze.

While this weekend’s holiday points us toward romance, eros, and the sweetness of being chosen, love is bigger than one definition.

The ancient Greeks named several kinds of love, and the distinctions are useful. Eros speaks to romantic desire. Philia lives in friendship and mutual regard. Storge describes familial devotion, the steady love that grows through shared history. Agape widens the circle further: generous love, offered without bargaining for a return.

When my second daughter was born on February 14th many years ago, my understanding of Valentine’s Day expanded. Romance remained part of the story, yet the day gained another center of gravity. Our trip to Savannah to be with this daughter and her husband is both storge and agape in practice: the gift of attention, freely given.

The Serviceberry fits that perspective. Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s other works, especially Braiding Sweetgrass, trained our attention toward gratitude and reciprocity, then asked us to live those ideas, not merely admire them. The Serviceberry continues the conversation, this time through the lens of economics and the ethics of “enough.”

Jill Hoy

A Berry as a Blueprint

The Serviceberry is a slender tome that opens a wide doorway. Kimmerer takes the serviceberry, small and fleeting, and uses it as a living lesson in abundance. Berries ripen. Birds gather. People gather. Seeds return to soil. Gifts move through the world and nourish more than one life at a time.

A botanist and member of the Potawatomi nation, Kimmerer braids Indigenous science and teachings through the pages, including the spirit of potlatch traditions, where generosity forms the foundation of social and economic life. In a gift economy, wealth is not what you stockpile. Wealth is what you can share. Status comes from what you give away.

Kimmerer describes neighbors who planted serviceberry bushes during the pandemic and invited others to pick the berries, outdoors and socially distanced, with no plan for payback. The scene holds a particular beauty: sweetness offered in a fearful time, generosity practiced without a ledger.

Kimmerer names the potential shadow side of what has become our current global economic structure. Commodification turns gifts into products. Transaction replaces gratitude. The posture shifts from How can we help one another flourish? to What do I get in return?

Medicine, Barter, and the Ethics of Care

Kimmerer’s words kept bringing me back to my own decade-plus of running a solo medical practice. I provided free care at times for people who could not afford it. I bartered at other times with those who lacked cash, yet carried other kinds of wealth: skills, goods, time, care offered back into the relationship.

Logistics matter. Structure matters. Sustainability matters. As a health service organization employee and member of that organization’s senior leadership team, I saw how hard it was to build systems that honor humanity without breaking the people inside them.

At the same time, we can’t pay the electric bill with promises of good will.

Kimmerer isn’t asking for a naïve rewrite of reality. She offers a different way to see it. The natural world models collaboration, restraint, and mutual support, then invites us to learn.

She also points to civic-scale places where this already works. Public libraries come to mind immediately, and she names them as well, as shared abundance living alongside the market. We don’t each have to own everything to live richly.

Valentine’s Day, Reimagined

Valentine’s Day can feel sweet. It can also feel a little scripted, shaped by expectation and purchase. Kimmerer offers a gentler, braver question beneath the roses, one that belongs to agape as much as it belongs to romance:

What does it mean to give without keeping score?
What does it mean to receive without rushing to repay, apologize, or diminish the gift?

Her insistence on “enoughness” lands perfectly on a holiday that often whispers “more.”

Kimmerer asks what replenishes the flow of gifts in a human economy the way the sun replenishes the economy of nature. Her answer reads like a Valentine in the deepest sense.

Love, in this frame, includes eros without being limited to it. Love also means philia, the friends who show up when life gets heavy. Love means storge, the family bond strengthened by shared time. Love means agape, care that circulates freely and multiplies when it moves.

A Love of Books and Friendship

Our recent Virtual Book Circle Winter Session was an example of care, multiplied. Participants brought a range of genres to share, including mystery, historical and character-driven fiction.

Building off the theme of midwinter quiet, with a gentle focus on stillness, reflection, and listening, we discussed Louise Penny’s A Better Man, Ariel Lawhon’s The Frozen River and Monica Wood’s How to Read a Book. The conversation gave us the opportunity to know one another better as people, with books as our backdrop.

One of my dear friends and Virtual Book Circle co-host, Karen Longfellow offered her reflection on the experience:

It is book circle night! I’ve been looking forward to this since we first discussed expanding our beloved ritual of sharing and discussing books. The circle is more symbolic to me. It sparks visions infinity and I think reading and sharing about books is uniting. I often feel like I could talk about books & their characters and themes for infinite amounts of time. A circle is also collaborative & nurturing. Our first circle was small but there was no shortage of lively conversation. There was time for thoughtful reflection and even some of our pets joined in on the fun.

I’ve always been hesitant to join a traditional book club because I didn’t want to be told what to read, so this circle is perfect for me. I a love to hear what and why others read what they read. We had a framework to guide our discussion, but the conversation evolved fairly organically. I think this circle is also welcoming so that if someone does not feel called to share, they can still attend and be in community with fellow readers. I am already pondering what my next read will be and how I look forward to hearing from others about what they pick & why.

I echo Karen’s sentiments and add my invitation to join us for our spring session—date coming soon.

Boat Book Verdict

The Serviceberry is another true metaphorical boat book. It travels well in a tote bag. It invites pauses. It changes what you notice when you look up from the page.

Thinking about The Serviceberry here in Savannah, held by the joy of family conversations, I’m struck by how love expands over a lifetime. A daughter born on Valentine’s Day will do that. A book like this will do it too. It reminds us that gifts want to move, not sit still. It reminds us that “we” can be an economic unit, not only an emotional one.

📚Your Turn

What’s a book that changed how you think about giving, receiving, or enough?
What kind of love are you practicing this season: eros, philia, storge, agape, or a braided mix of all four?

Leave a comment

Coming next week:

• celebrating the Year of the Horse and the Lunar New Year,

• Radio Maine: Live Stillness and Renewal,

• and an invitation to join our Spring Virtual Book Circle.

May this Valentine’s Day be filled with whatever version of love brings you the greatest joy.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Late January, Looking Up at the Branches

By the end of January in Maine, the trees stand in their most honest form. No leaves to soften the lines, just trunks and branches against a washed-out sky. You can see clearly what has broken off in past storms, what held firm, and where new growth might come when the light returns.

It feels like the right moment to pull The Giving Tree off the shelf.

For years, I knew it as many of us did: a simple story about a boy and a tree, one always asking, one always giving. As a child, I felt mostly like the boy, accepting the apples without thinking much about where they came from.

Now I read it as a mother of grown children, a recent grandmother, and as a daughter with a mother who is gradually letting go of her own belongings. I am still the child in some ways. I am also, unmistakably, the tree.

From Apples to Bare Branches

The boy in The Giving Tree moves through stages: swinging from branches, selling apples, building a house, and sailing away. Each time he comes back, he asks the tree for something, and the tree gives what it can—leaves, apples, branches, trunk—until all that remains is a stump and a place to sit.

There were years when I moved through my own “apple seasons” with my children, meeting needs that were mostly tangible. From lunchboxes and winter boots to birthday presents that could be wrapped and tucked into gift bags.

Now our family has entered a different chapter.

One of our grown daughters is married to an Army man. Their household stays nimble so they can respond to orders and move when needed. Another has just packed up her apartment and departed with her dog and her new husband, off to spend a year as digital nomads, fitting their life in a small number of bags packed in their car.

All of this is exciting and it changes how we give. This year, Christmas and the cluster of post-holiday birthdays could not be “thing” oriented in the way they once were. A bookshelf or a bulky kitchen gadget makes little sense when your next address is unknown.

At the same time, my mother has been thoughtfully giving away many of her own things, paring down to what is essential. I see her looking at an object and asking: Do I still need this? Who might enjoy it next? In those moments I recognize her as the tree, and myself as the boy, now the older man, sitting quietly nearby, wanting less and noticing more.

I am both: the child who once needed apples and boards, and the woman who has spent years offering what she could, branch by branch.

Presence as Present

Last weekend, we gathered to celebrate the birthday of my digital nomad daughter. There were no towering piles of presents. Instead, we had a meal together and cake at the end, the way we always have.

The “presents” that day were mostly our presence. My husband, some of our grown children and their spouses, and baby passed between laps. Stories passed back and forth. Future plans were sketched in pencil. No one could quite say where everyone would be living a year from now, but everyone could say, with certainty, that they were glad to be here, today.

This, too, felt like The Giving Tree, but quieter. The tree at the end of the book no longer has apples or branches or a long trunk. What it offers is a place to rest. An old friend. A familiar spot where the boy, now an older man, can simply sit.

As my own children carry fewer things and more experiences, the nature of my giving has changed. There are fewer wrapped boxes and more plane tickets, more long phone calls, more texts that say, “We can talk later if you want,” and more dinners squeezed into brief windows when everyone is in the same zip code.

I do have a copy of The Giving Tree set aside for the daughter who is leaving. It is waiting at home for her to reclaim when she circles back. For now, it feels right that her main gifts are less about objects and more about time and support, the invisible offerings that do not take up space in a suitcase.

Brian Emerson

Sitting with the Tree

As with many classic children’s books, The Giving Tree has invited debate over the years. Is this a story about unconditional love? About unhealthy self-sacrifice? About the human tendency to take more than is wise?

I am less interested in sorting it into a single answer than in noticing what it stirs in me now.

When I read it these days, I think about:

• How relationships change as we move through seasons of need, abundance, and limitation.

• How our parents’ gifts evolve from the material, rides, meals, safety, to the less visible, wisdom, perspective, and the offer of a place to rest.

• How we, in turn, shift from being largely on the receiving end to learning how to give in ways that do not erase us.

My mother’s gentle letting-go of her possessions, my own transition from buying toys to booking flights, and my children’s moves toward lighter, more portable lives, all of this feels held inside that small green book.

Part of walking the bountiful path is the willingness to revisit the stories we grew up with and gently rewrite our relationship to them. I can still be grateful for the comfort that The Giving Tree offered me as a child, while also imagining a different version of the story that better reflects what I now know about reciprocity, boundaries, and shared growth.

In the version I sometimes picture, the tree still loves the child and the child still loves the tree, but their relationship changes as they grow. The tree gives apples and shade and a place to climb. The child brings water in dry seasons, plants seeds nearby, and clears debris from the roots. When the older child asks for more, the tree does not always give away pieces of itself. Together they find other ways. They gather fallen branches rather than cutting off living ones. The boy plants a small grove so that there will be more shade and fruit for whomever comes next. As they grow older, the tree still has leaves, the person has stories, and they meet not only in times of need, but also in simple companionship.

I also find myself reaching for images from the Maine woods. There, a different kind of giving story plays out quietly under our feet. A birch seedling sometimes sprouts on a fallen log that is slowly breaking down and returning to the soil, using the fallen tree as a “nurse.” The old trunk holds water and nutrients so the young birch can take root. Over time the nurse log disappears and the birch stands on what look like stilts, its roots wrapped around the space where that first support once lay. Later, when the birch itself falls, it begins to break down and becomes part of the soil for whatever comes next. No one tree is only the giver or only the receiver. The roles keep shifting as the forest changes.

These imagined stories do not replace Silverstein’s book. They sit beside it and change how I read it. They remind me that we are allowed to keep growing past the first story we were told, and that love can be generous without requiring one being to disappear in the process.

I also think about what the tree does not give. It does not give advice. It offers what it has, then waits. There is something in that stance I am still learning. As my children move into their own chapters, I find myself practicing a kind of quiet availability: here when needed, out of the way when not. Rooted, but not clinging.

Why The Giving Tree Belongs on the Boat

For this final January Books on the Boat, The Giving Tree feels like the right companion.

On a boat, you cannot carry everything. Space is limited. You choose carefully. Food, water, charts, warm clothing, a small stack of books. The most important cargo is often the people on board and the time you share in close quarters.

Families are not so different. Over time, the “stuff” falls away, or is given away. What remains, the part that matters most, is the web of presence that connects us: the way we show up for each other, the phone calls, the inside jokes, the history only a handful of people share.

As we move from January into the heart of winter, I think of myself as both the boy and the tree, and also as the person sitting quietly on a familiar stump, grateful for whoever chooses to sit beside me for a while.

Your Turn

For this week’s Books on the Boat, I would love to hear from you:

• Has your understanding of The Giving Tree or another childhood book shifted as your own life has changed?

• If you were to imagine a “bountiful path” version of that story, what might be different? Would there be more mutual giving, more rest, more room for everyone to grow?

• Are there trees, plants, or places in nature that have helped you think differently about how we give and receive in our families or communities?

Leave a comment

If you would like companionship with your winter reading, and with your evolving story, you are warmly invited to join the Bountiful Path virtual book circle on February 3 (next week!). Each person will bring a book of their own choosing, and together we will explore how the stories we carry may also be gently rewritten. For those who may find it useful, we have created a participant sharing guide.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me,
Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Late January, Between Islands and Pages

Back in Maine, spring lives far enough over the horizon that we don’t quite squint toward it. The days are lengthening by minutes. Some mornings the view from the Littlejohn Causeway is silvery and open; other mornings, ice is more prevalent around the edges. Snow is expected again over the weekend.

This year, my winter reading has been shaped not only by islands and boats, but also by bookstores and airports.

I first went looking for How to Read a Book in our local shop, which was appropriate given the author’s personal approach to literary enjoyment. Monica Wood is a longtime champion of independent bookstores (and libraries). In the book’s acknowledgments she names Portland-area shops with a kind of affectionate roll call. When I showed up asking for How to Read a Book in the store near our home, it had already sold out, which of course made me want it more.

I ended up finding the book in the Boston airport at the beginning of our recent journey south. I slipped it into my bag, read it over the course of the week, and turned the last page as we winged our way back toward Maine. It felt fitting: a novel about the life-changing power of reading and community, carried between places like a small, steady lantern.

Helen Lewis

Three People, One Bookstore

For clarity: How to Read a Book is not a manual on reading. It is a contemporary, character-driven novel set in Maine, partly in a women’s correctional facility, partly in Portland, and partly in the fictional mill town of Abbott Falls.

At its center are three people:

• Violet, a young woman whose drunk driving accident killed an elementary school teacher and who has just completed her sentence at a local women’s correctional facility.

• Harriet, a retired teacher who leads a weekly book club for the women there and now wrestles with loneliness and purpose.

• Frank, a widowed machinist, still grieving his wife—who happens to be the teacher Violet killed—and working part-time as the handyman at Wadsworth Books, a small Portland shop.

Their lives intersect not in a courtroom but in a bookstore, that quiet civic space where stories and people mingle. A chance meeting near the shelves begins to pull their separate narratives together.

The novel explores what happens when people whose lives have been shattered by guilt, grief, and isolation are gently nudged into relationship with one another. It is a story of second chances, and of everyday decency. It suggests the kind of grace that does not erase what happened, yet insists on seeing the person as more than the worst thing they’ve done or endured.

That sentence could easily sit at the center of the book. Wood reminds us that we are not only our best moments or our worst ones. We are the whole, complicated mixture.

Inside and Outside the Walls

My connection to this book goes beyond the page.

Years ago, I had the chance to interview Wood about her work teaching writing to women at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham.

When we spoke, I felt an immediate resonance. As a young physician, I served as medical director in a county jail. Those months were formative. I remember the sound of metal doors closing behind me, the weight of keys, the faces of people who could easily have been Maine classmates or neighbors.

In that setting, the line between people inside the facility and those outside in the community felt startlingly thin. Monica has written and spoken about coming to understand that the gap between her and the women she taught was narrower than she ever imagined. I knew exactly what she meant.

In How to Read a Book, the prison book club is not sentimentalized. It is a room where women show up tired and guarded, then slowly lean into books and into each other. Time in prison is not treated as a single, flattening identity. Instead, we see people reading in different ways, bringing their own histories and kinds of intelligence to the discussion.

That simple affirmation feels like a quiet revolution in a setting where people are so often reduced to their charges and sentences. Not all forms of intelligence come with diplomas. Not all forms of harm are visible to the justice system.

In an earlier Books on the Boat post about Wally Lamb’s The River is Waiting (another story set inside a correctional facility), we reflected on the redemptive power of art: how creative work can help us reframe what seems irreparable. Wood’s novel feels like a companion to that piece. Where Lamb focuses on visual art fostered by a prison librarian, Wood focuses on reading and writing. Together they remind us that story in any form can open a path toward repair.

How to Read a Book reminds us that we all stand in need of grace, whether or not we have ever committed a punishable crime that leads to incarceration.

Reading as a Shared Human Practice

So much of this novel takes place around books: in a classroom at the correctional center, in a small independent bookstore, and in private spaces where characters read late into the night. The book club inside the facility becomes a space where Violet and the other women can try on different ways of being human: through characters, through conversation, and through the simple act of talking about a shared story out loud.

For Harriet, the retired teacher, the book club is a lifeline. For Frank, the grieving widower who repairs things in the bookstore, reading feels like one more thread tying him to his late wife. For Violet, books become a way to hold herself accountable and also to imagine a future in which she is something more than the sum of her worst night.

That exchange feels like a small thesis statement for the novel and, truly, for this whole Books on the Boat effort. Books will not fix our grief or our history. They can give us perspective, language, and company.

Later in the story, after Violet is released, she finds work in a lab that studies birds: creatures she once thought of mostly as background. As she spends more time with them, she begins to understand that they are far more intelligent, attuned, and communicative than she realized. The birds learn, repeat, refuse, observe. They surprise her.

Reading those passages, I thought about the non-human intelligence I have seen in my own life: the way a dog studies a face, the way deer (and donkeys) pause at the tree line and assess before stepping into the open, and the way crows seem to hold a kind of council on winter branches.

From my earliest years walking to school through the Maine woods, I have loved engaging with birds. Chickadees, crows, nuthatches, and their the first tentative songs of spring. Even before I knew the science suggesting that birds are much “smarter” than the phrase “bird-brained” implies, I knew, instinctively, that they were paying attention—to each other, to us, to the changing seasons.

Watching Violet wake up to the birds’ intelligence is another thread in this book’s larger fabric: a reminder that the world is populated with minds we do not fully understand, both human and more-than-human. We are always learning how to see one another more clearly.

Second Chances, Quiet Grace

How to Read a Book does not pretend that everything can be repaired. A person is still dead. Families remain estranged. The legal system has real consequences. Yet within that reality, the story keeps tracing small, human gestures of mercy:

• A retired teacher who keeps showing up at the correctional center, week after week.

• A man who allows himself, very slowly, to see the person who killed his wife as a whole human being.

• A young woman who chooses to tell the truth about what she did, and to live as if her life is still worth careful tending.

These are not cinematic heroics. They are acts of attention and courage, the kind that often go unremarked in daily life.

As someone who reads and writes a great deal about health, illness, and resilience, I recognize this kind of grace. We all move through the world with unseen stories, hurts, and regrets. Some appear in court records. Others live only in our bodies and dreams.

How to Read a Book helps us remember that every person we pass may be carrying a chapter we know nothing about, and that we can choose gentler language for them, and for ourselves.

Why How to Read a Book Belongs on the Boat

How to Read a Book is another “metaphorical” boat book, even though much of it takes place in rooms with fluorescent lights and shelves of paperbacks.

You also learn that a small vessel is always holding more than it shows at a distance: food, gear, people’s private worries and hopes.

Wood’s characters are like that. From shore, you might see only the outer shape: a woman leaving a correctional facility, an older man fixing a shelf, a retired teacher with a canvas tote of paperbacks. Step closer, and you begin to see the cargo; the guilt, love, memory, loneliness, and a fierce desire to make something better than what came before.

I also love that this particular story honors the spaces that have so often held me: local bookstores, libraries, and classrooms where people gather around pages. It feels right that I hunted for this book on my own favorite shelves, then finally found it in an airport before flying between islands. Stories, too, are waystations.

Your Turn

For this week’s Books on the Boat, I would love to hear from you:

• Have you ever read a novel that changed the way you thought about people in jail or prison, or about the justice system more broadly?

• Is there a particular bookstore, library, or classroom that feels like “home water” for you—a place where you can show up as your full self?

• When you think about your own reading life, what kinds of stories have helped you extend more compassion to yourself or to others?

Leave a comment

We invite you to be part of our book club through the Bountiful Path virtual book circle on February 3. For those who may find it useful, we have created a participant sharing guide, available at the end of a recent Books on the Boat post.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking with me along this bountiful path,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

January, Islands, and Borrowed Warmth

This weekend I am writing from a different kind of island than the one I usually describe.

We have temporarily flown south, like some of the birds that leave Maine each fall. When we run in the morning, we feel the sun on our shoulders instead of winter caps pulled down over our ears. Today, as we jogged along quiet roads, a few monarch butterflies drifted past us, orange and black against the bright green.

Seeing them made me wonder if these same beings spent part of their lives near us in Maine last summer, pausing in gardens and fields before continuing on to more temperate places for the winter. Will we see them again when they, or their descendants, head north?

Our own journey to this warm island involved weather changes, flight delays, and more rerouting than we expected. It felt a bit convoluted, until I remembered the path of the monarchs. Years ago, while writing a story about Inn by the Sea in Cape Elizabeth for Maine Magazine, I learned about their migration from the inn’s head gardener, Derrick Daly. Derrick was known for creating a “rabitat” for endangered New England cottontails, as well as a waystation for monarchs, who travel across countries and seasons following an internal map. Children staying at the inn could watch eggs become caterpillars, then cocoons, then butterflies ready for their long trip.

On my parallel Love Maine Radio conversation with Derrick, who has since retired, he talked about welcoming those monarchs the same way the inn welcomed its human guests. Food, shelter, safety, a place to rest before heading on. I think of that often, and I thought of it again this morning as the butterflies moved quietly over their temporary winter home.

Compared to the monarchs’ months-long journey over thousands of miles, our brief escape to warmer weather feels simple. Still, the act of leaving one island for another, even for a short period, has made me more aware of who and what stays behind, and who and what travels with us in memory.

This is where A Quiet Life enters the story.

Willa Vennema

Three Lives in Winter

Ethan Joella sets A Quiet Life in a Pennsylvania winter, where three people are moving through their days while carrying recent losses. Each has a different story. One grieves a spouse. One cannot stop wondering about a missing child. One is trying to find her footing after the death of a parent and the reshaping of her plans.

The widower, Chuck, keeps circling one particular question: what to do about the place he and his wife used to visit together in Hilton Head. That condo holds years of shared trips, small rituals, and quiet mornings. Now he has to decide whether to keep paying for a life that no longer exists in the same way or to let the place go. Even the author’s wry line about Hilton Head’s imagined motto, “Your Other Life Awaits,” takes on a different meaning when the “other life” you once shared there can never quite be recovered.

Spending time on a warm island myself while reading, I felt that dilemma in my bones. Physical spaces carry so much of our story. Sometimes the light and ocean air feel like a blessing. Sometimes they remind us of who is missing.

The characters’ lives begin separately. At first, we stay close to the ground of each person’s experience. We see the errands, the routines, the small decisions that fill a day when grief has taken up residence in the background. As the book unfolds, their paths begin to cross. Not in splashy, cinematic ways. In small-town ways. At work. In a store. Through a mutual acquaintance.

I appreciated how true this felt. In real life, most of us are either in the midst of, just beginning to, or have recently come through a significant challenge. A diagnosis. A loss. A change we did not choose. These experiences are common, but common does not mean easy. Joella manages to show how widespread they are without flattening the people who are living them.

Without my consciously seeking it out, loss appears often in the books I read and share here. That is not because I want to dwell on sorrow, but because grief is a very real human experience, and many of us find comfort and recognition in exploring it through words.

Each character’s story in A Quiet Life remains particular. Each person’s grief has its own shape. Yet slowly, as they begin to notice and care for one another, something shifts. They do not fix each other’s lives. They do make it easier for those lives to continue.

Cardinals at the Feeder

One of the loveliest threads in A Quiet Life is Joella’s use of the cardinal as a symbol. In the book, the cardinal appears as a reminder to stay present, to keep showing up for the people we love, especially when the weather of life turns cold.

Cardinals are year-round residents. While many birds head south, cardinals stay. They sit in bare branches and hop through the snow to reach feeders. On gray days, that red feels almost startling.

On our island in Maine, we regularly have cardinals at our feeder. They were already dear to me. Since the summer of 2024, they have meant even more.

My father died in July of that year. He was well known for feeding the birds and, truthfully, almost all the neighborhood animals. He paid attention to who came by. He was delighted by surprise visitors, including the bright red flashes of cardinals.

Like many Maine families, ours has had a hunting tradition. My father went hunting because it was something he did with his brothers and, earlier in his life, with his own father. They would gather at my grandmother’s farm outside Bangor, heading into the woods together in the early morning. For my father, though, hunting was less about taking a deer and more about spending time with people he loved. He liked sitting quietly among the trees and watching deer move in and out of the clearing.

My grandmother, meanwhile, was very protective of the deer who came to her place. They would eat fallen apples from the trees near the house, and she watched over them like extra, wild relatives who happened to prefer staying outside.

Around the time of my father’s passing, I began seeing more deer on our island than usual. They wandered down quiet roads and stepped carefully across our lawn. Deer are often associated with gentleness and compassion. Noticing them then felt like a small, wordless kindness.

Around that same time, my sister saw a cardinal land at her window. She thought of our father immediately. She and I talked about it later with our other siblings and realized that the cardinal had quietly become a kind of shared family signal, a small red reminder of his presence in the ongoing life of our days.

So when I met Joella’s cardinal, I did not need him to convince me of its meaning. The symbol arrived already charged with memory. His use of it felt exactly right. The cardinal in A Quiet Life does not erase loss. It stays beside it. It reminds the characters, and the reader, that some presences remain, even when everything seems to have changed.

Grief Without Losing Hope

What I admired most about A Quiet Life is the way it holds hard things without collapsing under them. Joella does not turn away from the ache of mourning. He does not pretend that missing someone hurts less if you keep busy or if time passes. The characters in this book feel their losses in their bodies and in their schedules. Sleep changes. Food tastes different. Activities that once felt easy now require more effort.

At the same time, the novel refuses to let grief be the only story. Alongside the sadness, people still get up and go to work. They still notice birds at the feeder and neighbors on their porches. They still make coffee, walk dogs, answer phones, and sometimes laugh at unexpected moments.

The book makes it clear that grief is not a detour from life; it is a part of life. It also makes clear that being surrounded by other people does not make sorrow disappear. What it can do is soften the edges. Share the weight. Change the story from “I am the only one who feels this way” to “I am not the only one, and there are people who will sit beside me.”

In this sense, A Quiet Life felt deeply aligned with the work we are doing together on the Bountiful Path. I am always curious about how people support one another through illness, loss, and transition. This book offers a quiet answer: consistently, imperfectly, with patience, and often in the smallest of ways.

Reading Slowly, Letting the Story Sit

I read A Quiet Life mostly in the evenings. I noticed that I did not want to rush. The chapters are not long, yet I often stopped after one or two, simply to let the scenes sit for a bit before moving on.

This felt respectful, both to the characters and to my own experience of grief. We do not move through loss in tidy chapters. We move through it in moments. Some days invite more reflection than others. Some nights we can handle heavier stories. Other nights we need something gentler.

The pacing of this book allowed for that kind of ebb and flow. It did not demand a binge read. It invited a relationship.

Importantly, although the novel explores strong emotions and themes, it never becomes heavy for the sake of heaviness. The tone stays grounded. In many places it feels almost soothing. Not because anything has been smoothed over, but because the author trusts that readers can handle the truth of grief and the truth of hope at the same time.

Why A Quiet Life Belongs on the Boat

This week, my “boat” is again more metaphorical than literal. Yet the way I moved through A Quiet Life reminded me of how we navigate a small vessel through winter seas.

On a boat, you pay attention to what stays and what goes. Some boats leave the water for the season. Others remain tied to their moorings, riding out storms and stillness alike. Supplies shift with the weather. Some objects become essential. A particular sweater. A favorite mug. A good book.

In the inner life, grief can feel a bit like an unexpected storm. It changes what feels essential. It changes what we carry close. In that sense, A Quiet Life felt like a very good piece of winter gear. A story that understands loss, but refuses to let loss have the last word.

The cardinal at the feeder. The deer in the yard. The monarchs drifting above our heads this week, perhaps on their own long journey back toward Maine. All of these are reminders that life continues to move, even when it feels still. They are also reminders that we share this movement with others, human and not.

Your Turn

For this week’s Books on the Boat, I would love to hear from you:

• Have you ever found yourself returning to a particular bird, animal, or image as a steady reminder after a loss?

• Does the idea of “being someone’s cardinal” resonate with you? Are there people who have stayed close during hard seasons of your life?

• When you read stories about grief, what helps them feel supportive rather than overwhelming?

Leave a comment

A reminder that our first Bountiful Path virtual book circle will gather on February 3. If you would like companionship with your winter reading, and with your own ongoing story, you are warmly invited to join us. For those who may find it useful, we have created a participant sharing guide, available at the end of last week’s Books on the Boat post.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking with me along this bountiful path,

Lisa

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

January Notes from the Studio

Like many of the people with whom I spend time, I am holding two parallel calendars in my mind this January weekend.

One belongs to the outside world. Yesterday, we recorded five guests for the 2026 season of Radio Maine. Each guest has a Maine connection and a distinct way of living out their creativity: painting, music, design, storytelling, and combinations of all of the above. Sitting in the recording studio, I kept thinking about how different their paths looked on the surface, and how similar they sounded underneath when they spoke about curiosity, risk, and the need to keep showing up for their work.

The other calendar belongs to my inner creative life: the writing I do here on Substack, the “someday” projects waiting in various notebooks, art cubbies and songbooks, and the ideas that have not yet found a form.

Listening to Theo of Golden as an audiobook fit neatly into that conversation. It is a story about a stranger arriving in a small town, and how an individual’s decision to follow a quiet, self-set creative project can ripple through an entire community.

Tim Sample

A Stranger in a Familiar Kind of Town

It has been said that most fictional plots boil down to one of two openings: someone goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Theo of Golden begins with the latter.

An older man named Theo arrives in the town of Golden, in the American South. He is not flashy. He is not famous. People do not quite know what to make of him. From the outside, Golden looks like many small towns: familiar routines, long-standing families, and a general assumption that everyone already knows everything there is to know about everyone else.

As someone who grew up in a small town and went on to care for patients in several different small towns, I know how much complexity can live under that surface. Families who seem straightforward often carry surprising stories. Wounds and loyalties pass quietly from one generation to the next. It is rarely as simple as it looks from the sidewalk.

Instead of rushing in with answers, Theo begins to notice. In a local coffee shop, he sees a wall covered with pencil portraits of townspeople. Little by little, he starts to buy those portraits and return them to the people whose faces are in the frames. Each visit becomes a doorway into a story. Sometimes the encounter surfaces conflict. Sometimes it brings relief. Sometimes it simply gives someone the experience of being truly seen.

What interested me most was not the “mystery” of who Theo is, but the way these small, mostly quiet conversations begin to alter the town’s emotional landscape. The underlying conflicts do not vanish, but they are named, nudged, and, in some cases, softened.

Art, Music, and the Everyday Sacred

Theo of Golden also held my attention in part because it lives at the intersection of art, music, and relationship.

Theo’s project with the portraits is, on its face, simple: buy drawings, bring them home to their subjects, listen. Yet it is also an art project in the broader sense. He is curating a series of human encounters. He is saying, in a thousand small ways, “Your story matters enough for me to come find you.”

Music threads through the book as well. Theo builds friendships with people for whom music is a lifeline: a student practicing an instrument, a musician playing on the street, others who find their way to melody or harmony as a way to make sense of the world. Art and music do not show up here as glamorous careers; they show up as daily practices, ways of noticing and making meaning.

These themes resonate with me, because they echo what we see so often on Radio Maine and the C: creativity is not something separate from ordinary life. It is one of the ways we move through our days with more honesty, tenderness, and courage. Whether we are painting, writing, cooking, parenting, or practicing medicine, there is a creative dimension to how we show up.

That sentiment feels as true in a clinical visit as it does in a concert hall. Skill matters. Training matters. But without love for the work, the people, and the purpose, something essential is missing.

Setting a Goal Just to See If You Can

The part of Theo of Golden that stayed with me most strongly did not come from the plot. It came from hearing Allen Levi talk about why he wrote the book in the first place.

As he tells it, he did not begin with a publishing contract or an agent. He set out to write a long-form piece of fiction simply to see if he could. He folded into it the things that interested him most: small-town life, music, faith, friendship, the ways people carry sorrow and hope at the same time. Only after he had finished did he begin to share it more widely and find people who wanted to help bring it into the world.

That sequence matters. He did not wait for someone else to give him permission or a deadline. He chose a project that would stretch him and made a promise to himself to keep going.

Many of us who come from structured professions know how comforting external scaffolding can be. As a physician, much of my early life moved along rails that were already laid down: exams, training programs, work schedules, call shifts. The discipline was real, but the goals were largely set for me. My brain learned to respond to deadlines that arrived from outside.

Creative work often does not come with that kind of built-in structure. No one is sitting in an office waiting to see whether we finished a chapter of a novel we have not yet told anyone we are writing. No automatic reminder appears when we have not sketched, practiced, or journaled in a week.

One of the reasons I appreciate Substack, and this Books on the Boat series in particular, is that it gives me a gently public structure. I tell you that I will send a Saturday book reflection and a midweek Bountiful Path piece, and then I do my best to keep that promise. Knowing that you are out there reading helps me move from “someday I will write this” to “today I will press publish.” Your comments and outreach keep me thinking, and expand the conversation asynchronously.

Beyond these regular pieces, though, I also have projects with more nebulous timelines. Essays that live mostly as notes. Ideas that may become books or courses or something else entirely. For those, I have to borrow a bit of Allen Levi’s approach. I have to set goals not because anyone is asking, but because my own creative life is asking.

Theo of Golden felt, to me, like a gentle case study in that kind of self-set discipline: one person choosing to see what might happen if he followed a story all the way through.

Why Theo of Golden Belongs on the Boat

As we’ve mentioned before, in this series, “boat book” is as much a metaphor as it is a literal description. Some of us truly read on the water. Others read in waiting rooms, on lunch breaks, or in the ten minutes before bed when the house finally quiets.

A boat book, in this sense, is any book that can travel with you through ordinary days without demanding that you rearrange your entire life to accommodate it. Theo of Golden fits that description. The chapters feel measured and humane. You can listen or read in small stretches, set it down to attend to real life, and pick it back up without losing the emotional thread.

It is not a thriller. It is not trying to dazzle you with cleverness. It is content to sit beside you and explore what happens when one person decides to live with a bit more intention and kindness in a place that has both beauty and brokenness. That feels like boat-worthy company to me.

It also pairs nicely with what we are exploring together this year on the Bountiful Path: how to blend structured discipline with spacious creativity, how to honor our professional and family commitments while still making room for the projects that call quietly from the margins.

Your Turn + Book Circle Update

For this week’s Books on the Boat, I would love to hear from you:

• Have you ever taken on a creative project simply to see if you could do it, without any guarantee that it would be published, sold, or applauded?

• If you live in a small town, or grew up in one, do stories like Theo of Golden resonate with what you have seen beneath the surface of familiar families and routines?

• Where in your own life are you experimenting with setting your own gentle structure, instead of waiting for someone else to hand you a deadline?

Leave a comment

A quick update on our Bountiful Path virtual book circle:
We have shifted our first gathering to February 3 to give everyone a little more time to choose and read their book. We have included a simple participant sharing guide below, so that those who are new to book circles can feel more comfortable about how to join the conversation. You do not need to be an extrovert, a “book expert,” or a paid subscriber to participate. Curiosity is enough.

If you would like company with your winter reading and a bit of structure around your own creative life, you are warmly invited to join us..

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking with me along this bountiful path,

Lisa

Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle

Participant Sharing Guide: January Edition

Welcome: What This Circle Is

This is a quiet winter gathering for readers who want companionship without homework. You are welcome whether you plan to share a book or simply listen.

There is:
- No assigned reading
- No expectation that you present perfectly
- No requirement to speak

Our January theme is midwinter quiet, with a gentle focus on stillness, reflection, and listening.

How to Participate

You can take part in three simple ways:

1. Share a book that is speaking to you right now.
2. Offer a short passage and a few words about why it matters.
3. Listen with curiosity to the books and reflections others bring.

You may do all three or just listen. Your presence is enough.

How to Choose a Book to Share

You do not need to choose the perfect book. Any of these options are welcome:

- A book you are reading right now
- A book that has kept you company in winter or a hard time
- A book that invites stillness, reflection, or deeper listening
- A book you reach for when you need comfort or a reset
- A book that opened a new way of seeing for you

If our theme helps, you might ask:
- What book has been a quiet light for me this season?
- What book helps me hear my own thoughts more clearly?
- What book has helped me listen to someone else in a new way?

If you cannot decide, bring one that feels good enough and trust that it is.

How to Present Your Book

Think of this as a gentle show and tell, not a formal presentation. A simple structure:

1. Name the book
- Title and author
- How you first found it, if that feels relevant

2. Read a short passage
- A paragraph or two
- You can also summarize a scene if that feels easier

3. Share why it matters to you
Prompts you can use:
- How did you feel when you first read this?
- Does it connect to this winter season for you?
- Does it invite stillness, reflection, or listening in some way?
- Is there a line or image that stays with you?

You do not need to have all the right words. Speaking from your own experience is enough.

Aim for about three to five minutes total for your share so there is space for others.

How to Be a Listener

Listening is one of the most important roles in the circle. You might:

- Let yourself simply receive the words and the voice of the reader
- Notice any images, feelings, or memories that arise for you
- Stay curious rather than evaluating or fixing
- Allow pauses in the conversation

If you respond after someone shares, you might say:
- The line that stayed with me was...
- This reminds me of...
- Hearing you read that made me feel...

You do not need to offer praise or critique. Think of it as sitting together beside a small fire.

Gentle Group Agreements

To help the circle feel safe and welcoming, we invite everyone to:

- Keep stories and personal details confidential
- Take turns and leave space for quieter voices
- Speak from I and your own lived experience
- Honor time so several people have room to share
- Assume positive intent and care for each other

You are welcome exactly as you are. Come with whatever energy you have that day.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

A New Year on the Water

We have stepped into the New Year, still very much in the midst of the “twelve days of Christmas,” that traditional stretch between December 25 and early January when the season lingers even as the calendar turns.

Over the holidays, our extended five-generation family has been fortunate to spend time together in many different ways. In addition to joining us for the larger gatherings, several of our grown children and their partners (and dogs) have been staying with us for longer stretches, which means the house has carried a shifting mix of morning coffee conversations, late-night laughter, and all the small, ordinary moments that make up real family life.

My mother has lovingly referred to our intermittently busy household as “the Littlejohn Island Bed and Breakfast.”

Here at the “LJI B&B,” some traditions have stayed and others have gently evolved. Before Christmas, my mother and I sat down to tea with my two now-grown daughters at Maine’s historic Lady Mary Inn in North Berwick, an outing that carried echoes of similar visits we shared when my daughters were much younger. The tea trays and linens felt familiar; the grown-up conversations did not.

Different ages, different stages, same deep sense of connection.

On New Year’s Eve, my husband and I went into Portland for dinner at Fore Street with several of our grown kids and their partners. This classic restaurant has a well-deserved reputation for excellence, with a menu grounded in ingredients from local farmers, fishers, and other Maine producers.

That meal also carried a quiet thread of memory for me. Years ago, I interviewed Fore Street co-owner and chef Sam Hayward about his early, trailblazing focus on local foods in the mid-1990s and about his passion for addressing food insecurity in Maine. I remember that Love Maine Radio episode clearly, because it also included a conversation with Share Our Strength co-founder about ending childhood hunger. Afterward, Billy sent along books by author and educator Parker J. Palmer, who writes about the importance of living an “undivided life” and caring for others in ways that reflect our deepest values.

That idea of undivided living felt very close at our corner Fore Street table. Conversation circled as easily as the plates, full of stories, jokes, small updates, and the kind of shared noticing that happens when people have known one another for a long time and are still learning who they are becoming.

Maine as a Celebratory Place

Our holiday outings reminded me how special it is to be with family of all ages and how fortunate we are to be in Maine, where place itself can feel celebratory. A harbor restaurant and a restored inn can provide not only good food and conversation-enhancing ambiance, but also the weight and warmth of shared memory.

Back on Littlejohn Island, the holiday decorations have come down. Our Christmas tree has moved back outside to reconnect with its evergreen family in a different form, adding its branches to the edge of the woods. The ice along the causeway is rebuilding, a jagged lace that comes and goes with tide and temperature.

The January Wolf Moon, another supermoon, rises this weekend. Thursday night it lit up our yard as if it were midday, and our small dogs insisted on going out to frolic, only to turn right around when they realized it was still very much winter.

For our reading life, this is the moment when we shift from December’s picture books and children’s stories to deeper winter novels. I wanted the first Books on the Boat of the year to be one of those expansive reads that can keep you company through short days and long evenings.

Buckeye first caught my eye at the top of several “best of” lists for 2025, and once I opened it I quickly understood why it deserves this acclaim.

A Long View of Family

Buckeye is one of my favorite kinds of novels: the kind that offers a long view of family over time. Ryan centers the story on two couples in small-town Ohio and follows them, and their children, across decades of the twentieth century. We move from the years around World War II through the postwar boom and into more recent decades, watching how large historical and social shifts ripple through even the smallest communities.

As a family physician who is also the daughter of a longtime family physician, I have always been drawn to generational dynamics. My work has often involved caring for grandparents, parents, and children within the same family, hearing how particular stories get told (and retold) at different ages. A novel like Buckeye mirrors that experience on the page. We watch relationships form, strain, mend, and sometimes simply endure. We see how decisions made at twenty reverberate at forty and seventy.

Ryan has a gift for capturing the way time itself presses on a life:

The book is not strictly historical fiction, yet it holds the textures of earlier eras with care. We glimpse the weight of war on those who served and those who stayed home; the unspoken rules of small-town respectability; the quiet limits placed on marriages by gender roles, religion, class, and “what people will think.” It is a reminder that relationships from prior generations, while familiar in many ways, unfolded within very different cultural and social constraints.

Art, Craft, and Reading Slowly

When we talk about the art and craft of creativity, writers like Patrick Ryan always come to mind. This is not his first time at the page, and it shows. The sentences in Buckeye feel carefully made without calling attention to themselves. Dialogue sounds lived-in. Small details—how someone sits at the kitchen table, the way a person reacts to a minor slight—reveal entire inner worlds.

This is the sort of writing that makes me read more slowly, not because the book is difficult, but because I want to stay inside its particular cadence. I found myself stretching it out in the same way I did with one of our earliest Books on the Boat features, The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb. I could have raced through Buckeye to see what happens; instead, I lingered, page by page, enjoying both the story and the way it was told.

That line alone is worth a pause.

Ryan also writes beautifully about aging and the way memory layers itself over the present:

Those sentences ring true in the exam room and in everyday life.

Context, Presentism, and Seeing the Past Clearly

While I was reading Buckeye, my mother happened to pass along an updated version of another Books on the Boat feature: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. First published in the late 1990s, Fadiman’s book tells the story of a Hmong child with epilepsy and the clash between her family’s traditional beliefs and the American medical system.

In newer editions of her book, Fadiman not only updates readers on the whereabouts of some of the people about whom she wrote, she also reflects on the book itself. When she first wrote it, very little had been published in the United States about Hmong communities, and even less had been written by Hmong authors. In the updated version of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Fadiman acknowledges how tricky it can be to write about a group we are not part of, and says plainly that she would not write that book today, now that Hmong writers are telling their own stories and claiming that space.

Fadiman also notes that she did not feel tempted to rewrite the book beyond correcting basic factual errors in updated versions. To do more, she says, would have been a form of presentism, smoothing the book into alignment with our current understanding and erasing the fact that it was written from a particular time and place. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, like many contemporary nonfiction books, was written of its moment and for its moment.

All of this floated in the back of my mind as I read Buckeye. Ryan writes from our present, but he sets much of his story in a mid-century world where the options, especially for women and for anyone who did not conform to narrow expectations, were constrained in ways that may feel unfamiliar now. The novel does not excuse harmful behavior, yet it understands that people were making choices inside systems not entirely of their own making.

Another character in Buckeye offers this reflection on the messages we receive from those who have gone before us:

Whether we are reading nonfiction like Fadiman’s work or fiction like Buckeye, it is helpful to remember this double context: the time in which a story is set and the time in which it was written. Both matter. Both shape what the author can see and what we, as readers, bring to the page.

Bridges, Boats, and Why Buckeye Is a Boat Book

So why call Buckeye a “boat book,” especially when many of us will be reading it on dry land during the winter in Maine?

In this series, the “boat” is both literal and metaphorical. Sometimes I am truly on the water, with a stack of pages beside me. Other times, the boat is the vessel that carries us through a particular season or story. A boat book, in that sense, is any book sturdy enough to travel with us through changing weather.

Buckeye feels like that kind of book. It has enough sweep to sustain a slow reading across several dark evenings, yet it is intimate enough that you can set it down and still feel close to the characters the next night when you pick it back up.

On the island in January, the horizon can disappear into low cloud. The markers of time become subtle: the moon’s position over the trees, the way the ice clings a little longer to the rocks each morning, the sound of the tide under the causeway. In Buckeye, time passes in a similar way. Children become adults almost without our noticing. A decision that seemed small in one chapter turns out to carry real weight in another. The book quietly asks us to think about how we, too, have changed across our own decades.

Ryan uses a lovely image for long relationships:

I thought of this while looking at winter water running under the bridge between Cousins Island and the mainland during a recent long run. I also thought of the bridges we build in families, partnerships, and communities over time.

Buckeye also dovetails with the work we are beginning together in the Bountiful Path book circle. This year, as we read across genres, I hope we will keep returning to questions like: How do families hold their stories? What do we carry forward? What do we choose to lay down? A novel like Buckeye offers a rich starting place for that kind of conversation.

📚Your Turn:

For our first Books on the Boat of the new year, I would love to hear from you:

• Do you enjoy “long view” novels that follow families or communities across decades? Any favorites you return to or recommend?

• Have you ever read a book set in an earlier era and felt yourself wrestling with presentism, seeing the characters’ choices through today’s lens?

• Are there writers whose craft makes you slow down, not wanting the book to end too quickly?

Leave a comment

If you would like company with your winter reading, you are warmly invited to join the Bountiful Path virtual book circle as we begin this new year together.

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking with me along this bountiful path,

Lisa

Come aboard: Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle starting soon

Beginning on January 13th, we will gather for a quarterly Bountiful Path virtual book circle, a quiet harbor for readers who want companionship without homework. Our first winter gathering will lean into January’s stillness, with a gentle focus on reflection and deep listening.

There is no cost to join us. You do not need to be a paid subscriber to The Bountiful Path to join us; everyone is welcome, with the option to subscribe if you would like to support this work or receive additional reflections.

We would love to have you! Click here to save your spot now.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

After-Christmas Snow on Casco Bay

On this Saturday after Christmas, the pace has shifted from communal celebration to quiet reflection, as we await the turning of the year.

Snow from the storms that have come and gone this month still clings to evergreen branches, and softens the edges of yards and fields. Running on the island paths is dependent upon those who have gone before, tamping down the winter white with their snowshoes and back-country skis.

Down by the Littlejohn Island dock, the shoreline rocks carry a fading white fringe. Rooflines hold remnants of the last snowfall: not quite new, but not yet gone.

Earlier in December we spent time with Snow, Lights of Winter, and The Shortest Day, stories that helped younger readers make sense of weather, celebration, and the changing seasons. This week’s book keeps the snow and the night sky, yet it turns toward older readers, including the adults who are doing their own winter wondering.

A Dog, a Wolf, and the Moon

In this story, a young dog named Amaya finds herself far from home and in real danger. An aging wolf steps in to protect her, at some cost to himself. To try to reunite her with her family, the two decide to follow the moon, trusting that its steady arc might guide them where maps cannot.

Their path carries them through forests and across mountains, into places that feel both familiar and dreamlike. Snowfields glow under the moon. Ruined buildings hint at old stories. The Wolf walks a little more slowly than Amaya, yet his presence gives her courage. She, in turn, brings out a tenderness and purpose he thought he might have lost.

What matters most is not the destination, but the way the book honors the companionship that grows between them. One is near the beginning of life, the other closer to the late chapters. Each has something the other needs. That dynamic feels deeply true to how many of our real lives unfold.

A Winter Story to Grow Into

The Dog Who Followed the Moon is a book that grows with us. The pages are filled with rich, detailed artwork that would captivate any child, yet the questions carried in the story belong just as much to teenagers and adults.

It is remniscent of the classic novella Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another slim book that wears the clothes of a children’s story while quietly asking very grown-up questions about how we live and care for one another.

A younger reader can follow the journey in The Dog Who Followed the Moon for what it is on the surface: a puppy and a wolf on a quest under a vast sky. An older reader notices the spaces between the lines, the quiet invitations to think about love, loyalty, fear, and choosing to move forward when the way is not clear.

Where our earlier December books slid neatly into the bedtime rotation, this one feels more like a fireside book. It is the kind of story you might read aloud to a thoughtful nine year old, pass along to a college student, or keep by your own chair as a winter companion.

This book mirrors how life actually works, particularly if we chose to follow the “Bountiful Path.” The path is generous, yes, filled with unexpected beauty and connection. It is also uneven and uncertain. We rarely know exactly where we are headed, only that we are meant to keep moving, as kindly as we can, with whoever is beside us.

Journeys at Different Points

I am drawn to this book at the end of December in part due to the way it honors different points along life’s journey.

Amaya is at the very beginning of her story, all questions and longing, as she seeks to find her parents. The Wolf is much farther along. He has lived through choices he cannot undo. He is still learning how to live with them. Their paths cross not because their lives are the same, but because each has something the other needs.

This is true in medicine, where I have sat with patients who are just starting to name their struggles, and with others who have been carrying theirs for years. It is true in our communities, where a neighbor may be shoveling out their very first Maine winter while another has weathered more storms than they can count.

Books like this help us see how those journeys can intersect. The Wolf does not simply rescue Amaya and send her on her way. He walks beside her. In doing so, he finds some measure of healing for himself. Resilience, the story suggests, is not a solitary achievement. It grows in the space between us, in the small decision to rise, once more, for the sake of another.

This book holds that reality without drama. Amaya is at the beginning of her origin story. The Wolf is at the beginning of his final chapter. Their meeting does not solve everything for either of them. It does, however, change the way each experiences the road.

Knowing that others are with us does not erase the hard parts of the journey, yet it changes the texture of those days. A shared path can turn uncertainty into something we can bear.

That sense of walking together will be evident in the Bountiful Path virtual book circle, starting in two weeks. We will not have all the answers there either. What we will have is a gathering of people willing to sit with good stories, ask real questions, and remember that even in winter, we do not have to travel alone.

We hope you will join us.

Why The Dog Who Followed the Moon Belongs on the Boat

The week between Christmas and New Year’s often feels like its own small island in time. Days blur. Weather rules. Snowbanks grow taller. Even on the water, life slows.

The Dog Who Followed the Moon is a perfect metaphorical boat book for this in-between space.

Norbury’s illustrations of moonlit hills and snowy forests echo the view outside a cabin window on a clear December night. You can imagine reading about Amaya and the Wolf while watching the real moon climb above the snowfields.

This is also a book that invites rereading. The first time through, you may follow the plot. On the second or third pass, certain lines land differently, depending on where you are in your own life. In that way it feels very much in kinship with The Little Prince, a story that somehow knows how to meet us again each time we return.

📚Your Turn:

As we stand at the edge of one year and the beginning of the next, we may be drawn to stories that hold both tenderness and grit; both sorrow and hope.

Do you have books that, like The Little Prince or The Dog Who Followed the Moon, seem to grow up alongside you, offering something new each time you read them?

Have you ever shared a book with a child, only to realize halfway through that the story is also speaking directly to you?

And in this snowy, post-holiday stretch, are there journeys of your own that feel a bit like following the moon, trusting that each step will reveal the path?

I would love to hear about the winter reads, for older children or for adults, that help you remember your own resilience and the ways we walk beside one another.

Leave a comment

🌟Thank you for reading, and for walking with me along this bountiful path,

Lisa

Come aboard: Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle starting in two weeks

Beginning on January 13th, we will gather for a quarterly Bountiful Path virtual book circle, a quiet harbor for readers who want companionship without homework. Our first winter gathering will lean into January’s stillness, with a gentle focus on reflection and deep listening.

There is no cost to join us. You do not need to be a paid subscriber to The Bountiful Path to join us; everyone is welcome, with the option to subscribe if you would like to support this work or receive additional reflections.

We would love to have you! Click here to save your spot now.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

Living Inside the Longest Night

December days in Maine are steeped in navy and slate, like the color of deep water against granite. The light slips away before supper. We often feel as if we move from lamp to lamp rather than from sunrise to sunset.

Arriving this weekend, the winter solstice offers a clear marker, a quiet line on the calendar that says, this is as dark as it gets; from here, light grows.

On land or on the water, I find comfort in that idea of a hinge point, a day when we can say, “We have turned.” The Shortest Day gives language and image to that moment.

As a physician living and working in the Northeast for many years, I can almost mark the seasonal turnings by the concerns that come into the office. As the days draw in, people who are otherwise quite healthy will describe heavier moods, restless sleep, or a vague sense that something is “off.” Once we rule out underlying medical issues (vitamin D deficiency is not uncommon here), I often find myself discussing the calendar, where the solstice falls, and how, from that point on, the light will slowly begin to return, even as the cold settles in for the long haul.

Like all living beings, humans respond to changes in light and temperature. Short winter days can disrupt our circadian rhythms. Our internal clocks are tuned to the daily light and dark cycle and help regulate sleep, hormones, and mood. Beyond seasonal affective disorder, large studies now show that thousands of human genes change their expression across the year, including genes involved in immunity and metabolism. Hormones follow seasonal patterns as well, and many inflammatory markers and cardiovascular events peak in winter. We now have good science to back up what many of us feel in our bones: internal clocks, hormones, immune cells, even the way our hearts behave, all shift with the seasons.

Humans are every bit as seasonal as the plants and animals we read about with our children—the plants that drop their leaves in winter, and the animals that hibernate.

The Shortest Day: Celebrating the Winter Solstice is a book for slightly older children, the ones already wondering not just what is happening outside their window, but why. They can sit a bit longer with questions of science and story, fear and comfort.

Jane Dahmen

Science, Story, and Monsters Under the Bed

In The Shortest Day, Wendy Pfeffer explains what the winter solstice is and why it happens. In calm, accessible prose, she describes how the tilt of the Earth makes our days grow shorter as winter approaches, how this affects plants, animals, and people, and what it means when the sun reaches its southernmost point and begins its slow return.

The word “solstice” comes from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still). For a few days around the solstice, the sun’s noon position in the sky seems to pause at its most extreme point before reversing course. In practical terms, it marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year in one hemisphere, the moment when the light stops retreating and begins, almost imperceptibly, to come back.

The book opens with an acknowledgement that, for thousands of years, people in different cultures searched for ways to ease the discomfort and fear that rose with the deepening dark. That idea lands clearly with children, because most of us remember a season of worrying about “monsters under the bed,” or shadows in the hallway after the lights went out. Darkness magnifies imagination, for better and for worse. Pfeffer treats that truth gently, showing how communities used story, ritual, and light to meet those fears.

Parents who can name this out loud, explaining that bodies and moods often feel different when the light changes, and that nothing is “wrong” with them, can normalize an experience many children might otherwise carry quietly. Books like The Shortest Day give families shared language for these invisible seasonal shifts, turning an abstract astronomical event into something children can watch and understand.

The text then looks back in time. Long ago, people watched the shrinking daylight with real concern, unsure whether the sun would ever come back. Over generations, they noticed a pattern. One day each year, the light began to lengthen again. Many of the celebrations that grew around this realization, bonfires, evergreen branches, feasting, music, candles, still echo in our modern holidays.

Jesse Reisch’s illustrations wrap all of this information in warmth: snowy woods, candlelit gatherings, animals in winter habitats, children observing shadows and stars. The art keeps the book from feeling like a lesson; it feels instead like an invitation to step outside and notice what the sky is doing tonight.

The Turn Toward Light

What stays with me most from The Shortest Day is not just the explanation of the solstice, but the feeling of that turning moment.

The book acknowledges the darkness. It does not rush past the long nights, the way animals hunker down or migrate, the way people light fires and gather close. It names the discomfort and the questions. Then, gently, it shows how the same darkness can heighten our senses and deepen our appreciation when light returns.

Here in Maine, you can track this shift in very practical ways. The sun sets at 4:03 one week and 4:07 the next. A walk that was once taken in pitch-black twilight begins to catch a wash of color along the horizon. Reading this book along with those observations can feel like narrative medicine. It connects what children see out the window with a larger story of cycles and resilience.

We began this December series at ground level, walking through the snow with Uri Shulevitz. The Shortest Day invites us to tilt our heads up and watch the sky.

On an island, awareness of light and dark becomes even more acute. Short December days demand careful planning. The solstice reminds us that navigation will soon get a little easier again. That knowledge alone can lift the mood on a cold evening.

Why The Shortest Day Belongs on the Boat

Within this month’s series of metaphorical children’s “boat books,” The Shortest Day feels like a deeper-water read.

It includes simple activities and ideas—like measuring one’s shadow over successive days— that families can adapt easily, even in a small space. The blend of science and story suits older children, yet the cozy art keeps younger listeners engaged.

I imagine this book aboard on the actual solstice, read aloud while the last light slips behind the islands, followed by a moment of quiet as everyone looks out at the harbor. The facts offer grounding. The history offers perspective. The turning point offers hope.

For adults, the message lands just as clearly. We all move through seasons that feel like extended solstices, work shifts, health scares, family transitions. Naming a turning point, even a small one, can help us keep going.

An Invitation for Your Solstice Season

I think of The Shortest Day as a thoughtful, steadying boat book for late December. It neither ignores the darkness nor romanticizes it. Instead, it reminds us that the wheel of the year keeps turning, whether or not we can feel it in the moment.

Do you mark the winter solstice in your home? Are there rituals, walks at dusk, candles lit at a particular hour, favorite foods, that help you recognize the shift from deepening dark to increasing light?

I would love to hear how you, and the children in your life, experience this turning point of the year.

📚Your Turn:

How does this season land in your body and in your home?

• Do you notice your own mood or energy shifting as the days grow shorter, or in the weeks just after the solstice, when the light quietly begins to return?

• Have you ever named these changes out loud with the children in your life, or used a book like The Shortest Day to help them understand why winter can feel different?

• Are there small practices — a brief walk at dusk, a candle at the table, a favorite story — that help you mark this turning point of the year?

I would love to hear how you are tending your own rhythms, and those of your family, as we move through the darkest days and begin the slow return to light.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading, and for walking with me as we celebrate the lights that illuminate our way along this bountiful path.

Lisa

Come aboard: Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle

Beginning in January, we will gather for a quarterly Bountiful Path virtual book circle, a quiet harbor for readers who want companionship without homework. Our first winter gathering will lean into January’s stillness, with a gentle focus on reflection and deep listening. I will be co-facilitating with another book lover, my friend and colleague Karen Longfellow. Karen is a nurse practitioner, yoga instructor, cat mama, Navy veteran and longtime volunteer with Maine Adaptive. She is a wise and lovely soul.

There is no cost to join us. You do not need to be a paid subscriber to The Bountiful Path to join us; everyone is welcome, with the option to subscribe if you would like to support this work or receive additional reflections.

We would love to have you! Click here to save your spot now.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

December Darkness on Casco Bay

December days in Maine open early with brilliance, but begin to close again before we know it, sliding all too quickly toward the quietude of night. By late afternoon, the sun retreats behind bare tree branches, leaving a wash of pastel color in its wake. Lobster traps, now gathered near the dock, cast long shadows across the frozen ground. Holiday lights below answer starlight above. Windows glow like small promises.

These short days still catch me off guard. Each year I wonder how we will manage the long stretch between midafternoon and bedtime. Then I remember: this is reading season.

Last week we stepped into a city version of the season with Snow by Uri Shulevitz. Lights of Winter offers a wider perspective, showing how different communities worldwide welcome this same season in their own way.

When my children were younger, that early darkness became our signal to pull out the holiday book box. Now I find myself returning to those same stories, even with grown kids, as a way of greeting the dark without letting it have the last word.

Lights of Winter lands in my hands whenever I want to remember that our little corner of Maine belongs to a much bigger winter story.

Joanne Parent

Lights Around the World

Lights of Winter is a picture book tour of winter celebrations across cultures. In simple text and bright illustrations, it moves through traditions from Saturnalia to Kwanzaa, showing how children around the world meet the dark and greet the light.

Conrad invites young readers to notice both the differences and the deep similarities between these festivals. On one page you might see candles in a window; on another, lanterns swinging in a nighttime parade or a bonfire blazing against the snow. In each celebration, light matters, yet the meaning shifts slightly with the needs of the community.

Although younger listeners enjoy the pictures, I often save this book for slightly older children who already sense that long nights can feel unsettling. It opens by naming how different cultures have tried to ease the discomfort of darkness at this time of year, something most children recognize from their own late–night worries about shadows and “monsters under the bed.”

In some traditions, light honors ancestors. In others, it honors a particular story of liberation or faith. Sometimes it marks the turning of the year or the return of the sun.

The book touches these reasons gently, in language that makes sense to young listeners, and leaves room for family conversation to fill in the rest. Walker’s illustrations add another layer of delight. The scenes feel both specific and welcoming, filled with people of all ages.

Different cultures, different histories, different colors of light. Yet the same long night, the same human instinct to kindle something bright.

Maine Nights, Global Stories

Reading Lights of Winter aloud in December feels like opening our living room windows onto the wider world.

As a child growing up in Maine, I first learned about winter holidays in other lands when my mother, a longtime teacher, brought home a book filled with celebrations from around the world. I was mesmerized by those pages. My parents understood that books could widen our sense of what was possible, so they made sure my siblings and I always had access to them—through the library, through school, and on our own well–worn shelves.

Our family heritage is mostly French Canadian, Irish, and English, and our traditions reflected this background. Little could we have known, as we pored over that book about holidays around the world, that our extended family would one day include people whose families came from many more countries, with very different cultural and religious traditions. All of this unfolded within my generation, a living reminder that the world we once only visited through books would soon be seated right around our own table.

In our household, we place candles in our windows and string lights around our tree soon after Thanksgiving. Some members of our extended family will be bringing out menorahs in observation of Hanukkah, which this year begins tomorrow at sundown. Over the next few weeks, other families worldwide will light kinara candles, clay lamps, and paper lanterns. The details vary; the intention to push back the dark remains steady.

The pages of Lights of Winter offer a simple way for children (and adults) to understand how other people welcome the season. It becomes a soft introduction to curiosity and respect.

Why Lights of Winter Belongs on the Boat

This month I am staying with children’s books that fit December’s reality: full schedules, short attention spans, deep feelings. Lights of Winter feels like an ideal metaphorical “boat book” for this time.

The book comes in brief, self-contained sections. You can read one celebration each night, like a small voyage, then close the cover and sit for a moment with what you have learned. The clear, colorful artwork suits a gray day at anchor or a quiet evening in the cabin while the wind moves around the hull.

On the water in winter, navigation depends on lights: channel markers, buoys, lighthouses, the steady beam from shore. This book functions as a different kind of chart, mapping how people across the globe have learned to navigate the darkest part of the year.

My favorite part of sharing this book is the moment when a child recognizes something familiar in an unfamiliar scene: “We light candles too,” or “That looks like our neighborhood.” Connection sparks. The world widens, yet somehow feels more intimate.

An Invitation for Your December Reading

Lights of Winter is perfect for evenings when darkness arrives early. Our Bountiful Path virtual book circle will be one of the ways we keep that shared light going through the winter months, even when we’re all tucked into our own homes. This season we’ll have the chance to share our versions of the winter experience, whether through longer works or picture books like Lights of Winter. If you’d like some company with your winter reading, we’d love to have you pull up a virtual chair in the book circle.

Next on Books on the Boat, we will stay with the theme of darkness and turning, moving from many celebrations to one specific celestial moment: the winter solstice, through Wendy Pfeffer’s The Shortest Day.

📚Your Turn:

Do you have favorite books that explore how different cultures celebrate this time of year? Are there stories that helped your children (or you) understand why light shows up in so many forms each December?

Pleas share in the comments!

Thank you for reading, and for walking with me as we celebrate the lights that illuminate our way along this bountiful path.

Lisa

Come aboard: Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle

Beginning in January, we will gather for a quarterly Bountiful Path virtual book circle, a quiet harbor for readers who want companionship without homework. Our first winter gathering will lean into January’s stillness, with a gentle focus on reflection and deep listening. I will be co-facilitating with another book lover, my friend and colleague Karen Longfellow. Karen is a nurse practitioner, yoga instructor, cat mama, Navy veteran and longtime volunteer with Maine Adaptive. She is a wise and lovely soul.

There is no cost to join us. You do not need to be a paid subscriber to The Bountiful Path to join us; everyone is welcome, with the option to subscribe if you would like to support this work or receive additional reflections.

We would love to have you! Click here to save your spot now.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.

First Snow on Casco Bay

The first real snowfall always seems to arrive overnight in Maine. One evening the dock is its usual stark weathered grey, and by the next morning the edges have softened. Rooflines blur. Island paths disappear under a clean white ribbon.

Snowfall rearranges everything. Street noise dims as people hunker down waiting for the plows. Light bounces up from the ground instead of falling only from the sky. It becomes easier to believe that something new is possible, even in a landscape you know well.

This is the mood that lives inside Uri Shulevitz’s book, Snow. A small boy looks up at a gray sky while the grown–ups insist nothing will come of it. The city remains busy, skeptical, preoccupied. Then the first flakes slip into view and the day begins to change.

Throughout December, we will stay with this feeling of magic as we share a small series of winter and holiday children’s books. These stories fit the season we actually live: full calendars, long lists, and occasional sudden moments of stillness that can feel surprisingly profound. Short picture books turn out to be just right for this time of year—brief on the page, deep in the heart.

Jodi Edwards

Pulling Out the Holiday Books

When my children were small, part of getting ready for the holidays involved more than traipsing through the woods to find the perfect tree, and bringing it home for decorating. As my older daughter reminded me recently, their season started when we pulled out the box of holiday books.

That box lived tucked away for most of the year. Opening it felt like lifting the lid on a treasure chest. Familiar spines appeared: the deep colors, the worn corners, the dust jackets just a little crinkled from years of small hands. We would stack them in a neat pile by the couch and choose one or two each night.

Evenings became their own kind of advent. Nightly reading offered a rhythm more dependable than any calendar. Picture books taught us that the holidays could arrive slowly, page by page, in the glow of a lamp, long before they showed up fully formed in the living room.

Snow nestles nicely into that tradition. The book is quiet and spare, yet full of feeling. Words are few. The images do the work of weather: gray shifting to white, streets changing from ordinary to enchanted. Reading it aloud invites a pause, the same pause that happens outside when snow first begins.

This ritual of returning to the same stories each year feels like a gentle form of narrative co-creation. Families rehearse the tales that shape them. Children grow taller, and voices change, yet the books remain the same size in their hands. Those pages become anchors of continuity, small reminders that our lives hold repeating patterns of anticipation, wonder, and rest.

During a month when many of us move at high speed, children’s books like Snow offer a brief, merciful slowing. Ten minutes with a picture book can feel like an exhale.

Uri Shulevitz, Snow, and a City Transformed

Uri Shulevitz was born in Warsaw in 1935 and later settled in New York City, where he spent decades creating picture books that speak in a quiet yet unmistakable voice. He became one of the most acclaimed illustrators of his generation, winning multiple awards, including Caldecott Honors for Snow.

The story opens with a small, perfect exchange:

Shulevitz wrote and illustrated the book himself, using watercolor and pen–and–ink to track the transformation of a bleak, gray city into something bright, enchanted, and new. No one thinks one or two snowflakes will amount to anything. Not the man with the hat or the lady with the umbrella. Not even the television or the radio forecasters. Only the boy and his dog have faith that the snow will amount to something spectacular, and when flakes start to swirl down on the city, they are also the only ones who know how to truly enjoy it.

I love that a book this simple on the surface can carry such layered meaning. Snow arrives as weather, yet it also feels like a stand–in for imagination, hope, or new ideas, especially those that adults may find easy to dismiss.

In Conversation with The Snowy Day

Shulevitz’s Snow always reminds me of another beloved winter classic, The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats, a children’s book author/illustrator who showed up in an earlier Books on the Boat post. Both of these books provide a city child’s view of winter weather that may be very distinct visually from our Maine experience, but very similar in spirit.

The Snowy Day invites us to follow Peter as he explores a world already remade by snow: crunching, leaving tracks, dragging a stick through drifts. Snow lingers in the moment just before that. The flakes have begun, yet most of the world refuses to recognize the change. Only the boy and his dog trust what they see.

These are the moments that interest me, in books and in life. The threshold times. The half–believed ideas. The quiet inner voice that says, “Something is shifting,” long before evidence piles up at our feet.

Many guests on Radio Maine and in our Off the Wall artist features describe their own versions of this snow–is–coming feeling. An image that will not leave them alone. A story that insists on being told. A body that demands rest before the mind can admit it. Creativity and healing often begin in that small, flickering space between doubt and belief.

Snowflakes on the page offer a simple way to practice trust. A child recognizes them first. The city takes longer to adjust.

Why Snow Belongs on the Boat

Snow and boats may sound like unlikely companions. Winter in Maine usually sends many of us indoors, or at least into thicker layers. I still think of Snow as a true metaphorical “boat book.”

For me, Snow belongs to that early December window when the first major storm signals that we have crossed into a new season. It invites the same attentiveness I feel when the wind changes direction on the bay or when ice first begins to fringe the shoreline. Small details signal larger movements.

Reading Snow aloud, whether to a child snug in pajamas or to oneself in a quiet corner, becomes a way of practicing presence. Eyes learn to track the subtle. Hearts remember how to welcome change, even when it disrupts plans or routines.

In that sense, Snow walks the same bountiful path that runs through much of our work: paying close attention, honoring seasons, letting stories help us see our lives more clearly.

An Invitation for Your Winter Reading

Snow is a gentle, luminous read. The pages turn easily. The impact lingers. Perfect for early December, when the calendar begins to fill and the heart craves a bit of stillness.

For the rest of the month, we will stay with books like this: stories that match the busy–ness of the season while still offering profound, often tender messages about faith, joy, and seeing the world with fresh eyes.

Your turn:

Perhaps you have your own version of that holiday book box. Maybe certain titles emerge only once a year, right alongside favorite ornaments and recipes. Maybe there is a particular snowy story that tells you, “Now the season has truly begun.”

I would love to hear about the children’s books, picture books, or winter reads that signal the start of the holidays in your home. Which titles did you reach for when your children were small? Which ones do you still keep tucked away, waiting for snow?

Next time on Books on the Boat, I’ll share another winter children’s book that carries some of this same quiet magic, again through the eyes of a child.

Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.

Warmly,
Lisa

Coming this week: Islands that May Surprise You.

Dreaming of ways to escape the snow?

Brought to you by the Portland Art Gallery, our second Artful Escapes symposium invites us to celebrate the changing season. As winter nears and days grow quieter, we turn our attention to islands—some serene, some surprisingly lively.

A special guest and I will explore how choices of place, pace, and thoughtful design shape what we notice and remember.

Guests are invited to enjoy refreshments and conversation during relaxed social time among others who value thoughtful travel.

December 11 from 5-7 pm. Open to the Public with Limited Seating

Come aboard: Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle

Beginning in January, we will gather for a quarterly Bountiful Path virtual book circle, a quiet harbor for readers who want companionship without homework. Our first winter gathering will lean into January’s stillness, with a gentle focus on reflection and deep listening. I will be co-facilitating with another book lover, my friend and colleague Karen Longfellow. Karen is a nurse practitioner, yoga instructor, cat mama, Navy veteran and longtime volunteer with Maine Adaptive. She is a wise and lovely soul.

There is no cost to join us. You do not need to be a paid subscriber to The Bountiful Path to join us; everyone is welcome, with the option to subscribe if you would like to support this work or receive additional reflections.

We would love to have you! Click here to save your spot now.

The Bountiful Path: Offering seasonal practices for real connection, rooted in medicine, leadership, and art.