Daffodils at High Meadows

Book excerpt: Daffodils at High Meadows is a collection of stories about the residents of a retirement community in a college town in western Massachusetts. These older men and women find liberation in their new lives-liberation from ownership, from responsibilities, from all the cares of maintaining a home and property. They make new friends, and together they experience the many adversities of old age with courage and grace, and with strong wills and a sense of humor. The subjects of Other Stories are as diverse as a young lieutenant who resolves his fears on the eve of his deployment overseas in WWII, a divorcee who learns that her former husband has changed in the years they have been apart, and a mother who is slow to recognize her grown children's selfishness. The characters in these stories are all fictitious, but they mirror real people. The reader will find himself, his parents and his children, his friends and his spouse here. He will grieve for them and rejoice with them as he would with his own, and the end he may feel with the residents of High Meadows that, whatever his age, he has found many new friends.