The library was eventually moved to wooden shelves within the store where it was pleasurable to look for books of interest. To my surprise one day, I spotted David Balcacci’s name on the spine of a book that was definitely not a thriller. Pulling out Wish You Well, I felt my smile widening in anticipation. On the cover, a young girl leaned forward over the shoulder of a younger boy; both were dressed in clothing that was suited for the country and from an earlier period. With my hope rising, I read the first page—I had found my Baldacci!
The air was moist, the coming rain telegraphed by plump, gray clouds, and the blue sky fast
fading. The 1936 four-door Lincoln Zephyr sedan moved down the winding road at a decent,
if unhurried, pace. The car’s interior was filled with the inviting aromas of warm sourdough
bread, baked chicken, and peach and cinnamon pie from the picnic basket that sat so
temptingly between the two children in the backseat.*
fading. The 1936 four-door Lincoln Zephyr sedan moved down the winding road at a decent,
if unhurried, pace. The car’s interior was filled with the inviting aromas of warm sourdough
bread, baked chicken, and peach and cinnamon pie from the picnic basket that sat so
temptingly between the two children in the backseat.*
I was spellbound. Since then, each time I reread the book, I am transported to the opening scene. It is more than the exotic name of the automobile or the aroma of peach and cinnamon pie—I am imagining a happy family, even though I now know that there will be an almost immediate change in circumstances.
Wish You Well is fictional, but the setting in the mountains of southwest Virginia is real. Baldacci has been to these mountains and as a child listened to the stories of his mother and maternal grandmother who lived there, his mother, Joyce Rose, for years and his grandmother, Cora Rose, for decades. When preparing to write the book, he spent a considerable amount of time interviewing his mother, so his novel is, in part, an oral history of where and how she grew up.
Reading Wish You Well took me beyond my enjoyment of Baldacci’s story; it prompted my memories of summer vacations at my maternal grandparents’ farm in Maine. I was born three years after the novel begins in 1940. In the summer following my winter birth, my mother took me by train to meet my grandparents in North Newport. With my sister’s birth three years later, we were a family of four that vacationed every summer for a week at the farm.
In a photograph, my sister and I, at about three and six, play dress up in Grampa’s and Grammie’s hats, safe on a side lawn, and watched over from a kitchen window. But at about seven, I began spending my hours alone, just wandering about, in the sheds and the barn, stopping at the door to the field to look out. It reached back to where I knew wild strawberries grew, then woods. I’d listen, standing without moving. Hay, in the shade, brushed against the house. Again, and again, I’d return to the stalls, being quiet, imagining—animals had left their smells there in the wooden boards. And even when Grampa had sold his hay, there’d be a bale left in the loft. I’d climb a ladder, lie on my back, and daydream. Swallows, in flight, dipped back and forth from the big, open doors to the higher, cobwebbed beams.
My girlhood memories of the farm reappeared in the writing of my thirties then returned in more detail in my sixties, preserved in “The Hayloft,” which begins A Flower for God.* Although my summer farm weeks were very different from the hard work of twelve- and seven-year-old Lou and Oz Cardinal, who by necessity move to live with their great-grandmother on her mountain farm, they were my doorway into Baldacci’s story.
The movie Wish You Well is due to arrive any day now, and soon, in the theater of my living room, I’ll be lying on my sofa for a summer evening’s showing.
My realization is, “We carry memories that may respond to a present discovery, acting as a spark that momentarily lights afresh a well-remembered time.”
* See Purely Prema, “Knowing in My Heart: The Mitford Series.” Love.