The filming location for the award-winning film On Golden Pond, Squam Lake, New Hampshire, sits just south of the White Mountains and northwest of Lake Winnipesaukee. Squam Lake serves as a nesting site for loons, bald eagles, great blue herons, and a home for trout, salmon, bass, pickerel, and perch. There's a sense of natural serenity there.
At the Squam Lake Bed & Breakfast, two couples arrive for a week of vacation in late August. Ella and Sean are nurses who had a challenging year battling COVID. They are long-time friends who are vacationing together without a clear idea of whether they have a romantic or Platonic relationship.
Ella's face is all soft lines, delicate ears, pixie nose, and cute freckles dot her cheeks and give her a sweet quality.
Sean stands over six feet with blonde, straight hair and skin tanned to golden perfection. He is athletic, with excess energy stored and ready to be discharged.
Ashley, a platinum blonde accustomed to lascivious glances from men and envious stares from women, arrives with Steve, a training manager. The latter doesn't want attention, even though he is a good-looking man and could easily attract female eyes. Ashley, a pharmaceutical salesperson, used remote video calls with doctors in southern Maine to sustain sales. She met Steve in Manhattan about a month before the vacation and could accompany him to New Hampshire so that she could spend several days driving to Maine for sales visits.
Their relationship remains misty like an early morning fog.
Eighty-year-old Olga Neilsen, the owner of the Squam Lake B&B, still misses her husband Harold, who built the B&B 40 years ago. Harold's been dead for 20 years, but Olga still fondly recalls his obsession with Sherlock Holmes novels and his love of reading books. That shared passion for reading brought them together. What kept them together was their skill for observation, and as Holmes once said to Dr. Watson, "It is my business to see in people what others don't."
On the third day of their vacation, Steve and Ella, who separately planned for a quiet afternoon on the B&B deck reading all afternoon, find themselves thrown together by Olga's machinations. Once they meet, they bond over a love of books and that sense that, as Anna Quindlen once wrote, "In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own."
Two days later, another reading session on the deck becomes an intimate setting to share life stories and tales of their favorite books.
As they return to their routines, Ella and Steve agonize over whether two afternoons sharing a shared love is enough to start a relationship and the status of their current relationships, if they even qualify as such.
Once their vacation ends, Ella and Steve have to make life-changing decisions, with Olga furtively encouraging them to consider a Jane Austen observation that, "seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others."
What happens to Sean and Ashley? The two people who may enjoy the zest in life more than the best in life.

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• Literature & FictionContemporary FictionRomance

• Publication Date: August 30, 2022
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 180 Pages
• File Size: 15 KB