A novel about a house that burns and a family deciding whether to rebuild. A Summer Book Circle reaching from Maine to California. A memory my mother offered, of a girl who read by flashlight at the bottom of her sleeping bag.
Today we had five Radio Maine conversations, which will air in the coming months. Before the interviews, I went for a quick run around the island in the mist, past our boat in the mooring field. It was quieter than it has been lately. The rain had temporarily stilled the construction machinery and the joyful summer boat noise, at least for a morning. How quickly we have moved from the golden-yellow forsythia sprinkled with early spring snow to the lacy purplish allium skeletons laced with late June raindrops. I found myself hanging over the neighbor’s wooden fence to snap a photo of the season’s first cosmos, as I thought once again about how insistently nature moves through cycles of growth and quiescence, both quiet and dramatic.
Those same cycles ran through the books our readers brought to this week’s Bountiful Path Summer Virtual Book Circle. My contribution was The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff.
A marriage is coming apart. Then the house burns, and the people inside it move back under the roof of an older generation, where an aging parent is slipping into memory loss. The question of what to rebuild becomes literal.
Damoff writes about families through the lens of a former social worker. She lets the marriage stay complicated instead of deciding who was at fault.
This is a book about whether you cling to what remains or let it go and begin again.
I read the following passage in the Virtual Book Circle:
There are etchings on this door frame, where the kids have marked their heights over the years. The notches have been here so long, I barely noticed them, but I rub my fingers across them now.
— Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side
This passage prompted conversation. I live in a house that I would find very hard to lose, even if it could be rebuilt exactly as it is. For me, it is less the structure than the location: overlooking the channel between Littlejohn and Chebeague Islands, where we watch the boats go by and follow the sun across the eastern sky. It is where my youngest daughter finished high school, where I recovered from breast cancer, and where I welcomed my father for a final few celebrations.
My mother, who has lived through a house fire, put it most accurately: a house is a box of lumber; what you grieve is the gathering place a family makes inside it.
We live in homes until we leave them, and then they live in us.
— Sarah Damoff, The Burning Side
A house can be rebuilt. The life a family lived inside it cannot.
Our Summer circle drew mostly familiar Maine faces, with one new reader joining from the other coast. In our circle, there is no assigned book, and no pressure to finish anything before arriving. This leads to a conversation shaped by attention and curiosity.
Seeing the afternoon light behind that new reader on the screen, I felt something she could not have known. Two years ago, at just this time of year, I was in California myself, watching my son finish his medical residency, while three time zones east, my father was nearing the end of his life. That same ordinary California light had lit one of the tenderest summers I have known.
What I love about this circle is that we each show up to books differently, drawn to them for our own reasons, and we each take something from the retelling. We stay connected across different lives and places through a shared love of story.
My mother, who reads with us, reminded everyone how this began for me. As a girl, I read by flashlight at the bottom of my sleeping bag, a pile of books at my feet, my toddler sister asleep across the room. I have never fully reformed. I will still, on occasion, stay up far too late to finish a book, though my husband does not ask that I use a flashlight to illuminate the pages.
I bring this same love of story to my writing, to the conversations I host on Radio Maine, and to this circle.
I noticed three threads this week. My mother brought The Lioness of Boston by Emily Franklin. She walked us through Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was shut out by Gilded Age Boston and instead built a community of artists of her own. We talked about belonging and about what people make for themselves when they are left out.
Our California guest brought We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter, a story inspired by real events in which a Jewish family, scattered across continents during the war, gave up their own names to survive and found one another again through the Red Cross. She asked the hardest question of the evening: What does it take to stay connected when everything else is being taken away?
Our co-facilitator, Karen Longfellow, brought Good Joy, Bad Joy by Mikki Brammer, about an eighty-nine-year-old woman weighing a quiet life against the loud and consequential ones, and Natalie (of Eat. Stay. Wheel. fame), continuing her reading of Amie McNee’s We Need Your Art, had several of us talking about our own creative work and what we let crowd it out.
The circle always sends me back to my own stack with a few additions in hand.
The Burning Side is a book to read slowly, somewhere you love, in a season when you have the attention to give it. It left me asking what a home is made of. There is no one answer to that question.
What in your life would you rebuild exactly as it was, and what would you let yourself begin again?
This morning’s run took me past the boat at its mooring and the first cosmos of the year, and I thought about how quickly the season turns from one bloom to the next. A house is not so different. It holds us while we live in it, and it goes with us when we leave.
The girl with the flashlight is still here, reading later than she should on an island in Casco Bay. The next Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle gathers toward the end of summer, with an eye to early fall. Come with whatever words are captivating you.
Thanks for reading, and for walking this bountiful path with me.
Lisa
Summer Solstice, Fathering and the Kingfisher on the Causeway: a kingfisher back on the wire, a granddaughter's first boat ride, and fathering across three generations.
Featured on Radio Maine: Susan Newbold — on starting art school at fifty, and what changes when you finally begin.
Off the Wall: Entering the River of Color — Maine painter Jane Dahmen on resilience, intuition, and the freedom of large-scale color.
July at Portland Art Gallery: Ann Trainor Domingue, Holly L. Smith, Liz Prescott and Page Eastburn O’Rourke. June 23 to July 27. Opening reception Thursday, July 2, 5 to 7 pm.
© 2026 Dr. Lisa Belisle. All rights reserved.
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