Sherry Delivers

Back in 2002, I suddenly heard the screen door slamming. I sat down to write about that door which opened a portal in my mind to those lazy summers I'd spent as a child in Westport, CT. Bit by bit, stories both true and fanciful sprang up and before I knew it, I was journeying toward my first novel, Sherry and The Unseen World. Many of the characters were drawn from that long ago time and as I wrote, I was back in those halcyon days.

I thoroughly enjoyed promoting the book. People told me how the book brought them back to their own childhoods, how they as one person said, "... remember crushes, falling in love, camp, Hamburger Heaven, returning to the city after spending summers away, and attempting to like a sport for my “new man of the moment."

Every time someone new tells me how the book touches them, I know why Sherry needed a voice, as did Sherry's marvelous Aunt Geraldine who brought intrigue and magic and helped Sherry find her own way in the world.

Only now I am in the process of selling the house with the screen door. Now that my mother has died, I know that my infrequent visits to that time and place do not justify the costs of maintaining that residence. The house is on the market, it's been stripped of the old furnishings and it awaits the new family that will delight in the colonial architecture, the spacious grounds and the proximity to the beach.

Yet, my heart yearns for over fifty years of all that living I did there both as a child and on into adulthood. My children spent parts of their summers in that same place. We will all miss the tiny door that led from the main house into the charming little apartment over the garage. Sure, you could access the place from the separate entrance up normal stairs, but the charm of that tiny door was priceless and still is.

Over the years, changes affected all of us. We mourned the loss of the charming old stores on Main Street that were replaced by the inevitable Gap, Ann Taylor and Starbucks. How the town could give up the Remarkable Book Store and Kleins is beyond my comprehension.

I wake up and smell the soft air, the freshly mowed lawns and the privet hedges. I am transported back to family cook-outs, to the parents and brother who are no longer on this earth, to the crunch of cars entering the gravel driveway and the excitement of each new day's promise. And, then I am so very grateful that I wrote all that down in my novel, that I can revisit the house on Danbury Avenue any time I want, not just mentally, but in the pages of the book.