What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [31]
The more time Dana spent in Wilmot Flat renovating the fire station, the more she craved time to be there. The first year of renovations, she stayed in Wilmot for four months. The next, six months.
Dana may not have found a love like Kenyon and Hall’s, but she had found the love of a place—a community of 1,369 residents, neighbors more bound by traditional New England values than by property values or shopping venues.
Wilmot Flat might have no retail stores and only one restaurant, but during the summer it has a farmer’s market on the green where a couple of dozen vendors sell produce and goods and neighbors mingle and talk. It has a communal character, and its character seized Dana’s affection. That and a spirit seen in another of Kenyon’s poems, “Potluck at the Wilmot Flat Baptist Church,” in which she describes a visit to the church for a reading, and, on entering catching the smell of coffee and seeing the speaker’s table “decorated with red, white and blue streamers and framed Time and Newsweek covers of the President, just elected.” She felt, she wrote, the presence of people “trying to live ordered lives,” and “was struck again with love of the Republic.”
“I fell in love with those same real folk, who try to make things as pretty as they can, and do so with resourcefulness and incredible joy,” Dana said.
It took a little longer for the village to embrace Dana. Her renovation of the firehouse and her unpredictable comings and goings gave rise to suspicions. By traditional New England standards, she seemed too mercurial and rootless. Some had even heard her talking about letting people use her house for yoga classes when she wasn’t there. Then word got out that the United States Postal Service planned to abandon the current post office, which it rents, and build a modern facility elsewhere.
Dana went ballistic in its defense.
“I said, ‘Uh-oh! If we don’t fight this, we’re going to end up with a town with no center, like the ones I grew up in in California.’ The post office and the community center were shoring up the center of town. The town came together at the post office during the week and at the community center on weekends,” she said. She held a small organizing fund-raiser at the fire station and immersed herself in village affairs. The community mounted a successful campaign to keep the post office where it was.
Meanwhile, a two-year study determined that the old community center, which doubled as the village’s preschool, needed to be condemned and replaced. Dana took up the cause. She courted the newer, more affluent residents of Wilmot like herself to contribute to building a new community center. She donated a piece of her own adjacent land to allow for a building to be sited better. Folks in Wilmot Flat began to warm to Dana and her motivating enthusiasm. Her attachment to the village grew still greater, along with her astonishment at how the tiny community came together and built the new center. “I couldn’t believe so few people could get so much done,” she said as we sat at her country kitchen table.
For all the calm and community Dana found in Wilmot Flat, her own life continued to feel fragmented and unsatisfying. The nature of her consulting business was changing and stirring uncertainty. As financial institutions began to employ ever more abstract and speculative strategies, imaginative clients seemed harder to find. Meanwhile, a nagging desire to do something meaningful to celebrate her sixtieth birthday, which she had been nursing for a decade, kept growing more insistent.
It had begun when a business partner introduced Dana to Olga Murray in Sausalito. For thirty-seven years, Murray had worked as a staff lawyer for justices of the California Supreme Court. For most of those years, she worked directly for the chief justices, helping to write landmark opinions on civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental policy. But what captivated Dana was when Murray told her the story of how she had celebrated her sixtieth