The Seasons Hereafter (40 page)

Suddenly Van's stomach sucked in on a great shuddering breath, but she quickly expelled the air and forced herself to breathe more naturally. At last I'm free, she thought with either grief or irony, she didn't know which.

As she crossed the yard, Barry came through the break in the alders behind her. She pretended to feel the dish towels hung on the line, and he went on into the house. She was alone for this few minutes. She, Anna Howard.
You're young, you have a life
, he had told her, and she had answered,
I had a life and you were it
. They were both right. The agony of the truth struck her again so that she almost staggered, and agony at once took on forever the texture of a linen dish towel, natural-colored, edged in blue.

Then as a gay burst of voices sounded on the boardwalk beyond the Campions', she unpinned the towels and began to fold them with neat housewifely motions. It was a curious thing, she reflected, that in all the disguises The Day had taken she had never guessed until now what its true face would be.

E
lisabeth Ogilvie's striking evocation of the atmosphere of the Maine seacoast that is the background of
The Seasons Hereafter
is no accident, for she lived in just such an area for many years, and her love for its people and their way of life has influenced all her novels.

Her activities on Gay's Island, where she spent most of the year, included writing, gardening, and “trying not to suspect that a bear is at the door, a moose lurking in among the alders, or a horned owl hovering overhead about to bear away the cat.”

She contributed a considerable amount of writing of magazine fiction and children's books, and is the author of several novels, including
There May Be Heaven
,
The Witch Door
,
Rowan Head
,
The Dawning of the Day
,
Storm Tide
, and one book of nonfiction,
My World Is an Island
.