"I woke from a dream," begins this engaging memoir of one woman's happy and sad life. With help from letters sent, received, and found; journal entries; and not-so-perfect poems, Loraine paints delightfully detailed word portraits of her childhood "not full of bad people doing bad things" in Concord, Massachusetts; of nursing school in Boston during the Polio epidemic; of working in two New York City Hospitals; of finding love on a boat on a river in New Jersey, followed by a forty-year marriage they were told "might not last," much of it spent laboring, laughing, and loving on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, raising pigs, sheep, squash, blueberries, and three Boy Scouts; of surviving short and long good-byes; and of new love sparked at a picnic for "old people."