she was most herself.
I am saying that plainly, because everything that follows rests on it. Not the house in town, where she spent the school year while she was still teaching, and later the winters, when the cold sat harder on her than it once had.
The lake house—bought with my grandfather before I was born, the summer ground of the whole family for as long as anyone could recall—was where Frances June Merritt was complete.
In 1982, the year my mother was born, she put flowers along the
