What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [30]
Still, her business had never become self-sustaining. By the early 1990s, Dana was questioning how much longer she wanted to push on with her business. At about that moment, Dean LeBaron, an iconoclastic billionaire investor, entered the picture. Dana and Dean had often run into each other in the rarefied world of high finance and flirted with having a relationship, but the timing was never right. Finally, she and LeBaron were simultaneously free, ready, and interested. After a life of romantic disappointments, Dana was optimistic that at last she had found a relationship with an intellectually compelling soul mate. She hoped they would spend the rest of their lives together. “Spending thirty minutes talking to Dean is like spending weeks talking to somebody else,” she said.
In 1993, Dana took a radical step. She left her home in Mill Valley, California, and moved to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, to live with LeBaron. He was in the process of selling his privately held firm, Batterymarch Financial Management of Boston, for a reported $120 million. Two years later, the romance was over. LeBaron, as it turned out, had other interests, and Dana was left heartbroken, depressed, and in disarray.
Waiting was never Dana’s strength. Instead, she did what she usually does in times of distress. She went to the nearest bookstore. Inside, she stopped to read a newspaper article from the Concord Monitor that was perched on a store display. It told the story of the remarkable romance of two poets, Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall. Kenyon had been the poet laureate of New Hampshire when she died of leukemia at forty-seven in 1995 in Hall’s old family farmhouse in Wilmot. The poets had shared a life that inspired Kenyon to write her most famous poem, “Otherwise.” It concludes with an unforgettable stanza on love and mortality:
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know
it will be otherwise.
That’s the kind of love I want! I’m moving to Wilmot Flat! Dana told herself.
And like that, Dana, at fifty-two, went off to find a house there. Her budget was under $100,000. Not long after she began looking, she bid on a mountainside ranch house. But she lost out to a higher bidder. “I thought maybe it was a sign that I just wasn’t meant to live in Wilmot. But then I became determined. I would not accept that outcome. So I hired the realtor who represented the buyer who outbid me.” She began, as she likes to say, to look at lots of little houses with no potential. One day, six months later, when she was house hunting, the realtor drove past Wilmot Flat’s dilapidated former fire station. Dana asked about it, and he tried to put her off: “You don’t want to look at that.”
But she did want to. She had a gut feeling about it. “And besides, it was so sad. I could see it needed to be fixed. It was forlorn. And it needed to be rescued. That’s me, isn’t it, romantic and to the rescue?” she said, laughing her best full-throated laugh at her own foible.
When she bought the wood-framed firehouse, it needed a lot of help. By 1997, after camping out inside it for two years, Dana had saved enough money to begin renovations that took two years to complete. Local workers installed new windows, demolished a dropped ceiling to reveal beautiful original wood rafters, jackhammered the grimy floor and replaced it with a new wood floor over radiant heat, and installed an open kitchen. Stained clapboard went up on the walls of the front fire engine bay,