This is a true story from an old Yankee magazine that has always haunted me. Although there is no violence in this story, it involves a lost child, so don't read it if that is disturbing to you. Even now, four years later, Ron and Jill Newton will sometimes let their minds drift back and silently relive that Labor Day weekend, hour by hour, trying to snatch it all back and hold it still at 10:00 A.M. Sunday, August 31,1975. It had been a grand weekend, camping with their children, Kimberly, age six, and Kurt, age four, and three other families from their home in Manchester, Maine. Natanis Point Campground was small and remote, its fifty-eight sites cut from a paper-company forest 1,300 feet above sea level in Chain of Ponds, a wilderness township six miles below the Canadian border at Coburn Gore. Campers fished from two ponds that were deep and cold. When a fisherman landed a salmon from the small wooden bridge below the thread of beach, he would yelp with pleasure and a crowd would gather. Mountains loomed over the ponds, and when at night a loon wailed and the forest pressed close on all sides, you knew you were away. That Friday the Newtons arrived first. It was their first trip with the recently acquired secondhand tent trailer, what Jill called "our luxury." They gathered wood along an abandoned logging road nearly a mile from their campsite. "It isn't camping without a bonfire," Kurt said happily. On Saturday their friends arrived, and Kimberly raced her bicycle through mud puddles while Kurt furiously pedaled his big-wheel tricycle after her, trying to keep up. It was the end of a summer, and there were huge meals and laughter and quiet, chilly nights by a roaring fire. To Jill Newton things felt "just right," which was not unusual. "We'd been married eight years," she would say later, "and everything just seemed to work right. We got along so well. We had saved for four years to buy a house, and when we were ready, there was our house across the street from the elementary school. From before we were married we always said we'd have two children and no more. We had a girl and then by a stroke of luck we had a boy, just what we wanted. It became a sort of joke between Ron and me. We'd say, 'How did we get so lucky? " Sunday broke with a heavy mist over the ponds. Ron took the bite off the morning, using the last of the wood to light a fire. Kurt slept until nine, fighting off a cold; when he awoke he shivered. "I'm so glad Daddy built a bonfire," he said. Ron dressed Kurt for the damp, chilly morning: red jersey, navy blue sweatshirt, speckled red and black corduroys. Kurt tugged on dark brown shoes over mismatched white socks and topped off his outfit with a favorite navy blue jacket decorated with baseball emblems. Jill called Kurt "a head-turner," a striking child with an impish sweet face, bright blue eyes, and platinum blond hair. "The loveliest, sweetest towhead kid you ever saw," said a neighbor....

Vee, thanks for the warning! It will probably take some time to be shown here on a Free to Air channel anyway if at all! The paid services get the good shows early but although I could afford a subscription, I can't be bothered. I have enough to watch mostly with an occasional DVD library loan. Re...toilets and lavatories, I recall being told not to use certain words, deemed to be rude. We went to the bathroom and only spoke of our bottoms and backsides! It helped when the classless Loo became popular.

I finished Homecoming by well-regarded Australian author Kate Morton. I then went to check if I had read any others of hers, and found my assessment of The Forgotten Garden (aka The House at Riverton) which concluded 'I don't think I will bother with any more'!! It was an interesting story about a 40-ish Australian woman living in London who flies home to Sydney after her grandmother, who brought her up, had a fall. She is an investigative journalist who finds out about a tragedy in her family's past, but in doing research on the internet, finds there was a book written at the time about it, and gleans all her information from that. Of the main characters, the grandmother was a bully who considered everything had to be done her way, the mother was a cipher for most of the book, and the journalist character was OK. The mystery was done well. However, the author had done a lot of research, and the reader was made to pay. There was so much extraneous information, long descriptions of the birds, the trees, the weather and so on. But most annoying were the factual mistakes, many of which should have been avoided by the above-mentioned research. Since part of the book was set in the Adelaide Hills near where I live, I picked up on them, but I suppose the out-of-town reader wouldn't have noticed. I also finished listening to the wonderful House of Niccolo books by Dorothy Dunnett.

I added All About Me! by Mel Brooks to the game thread a while back, and thought it might be a good read. I’m on page 130 of 806(!) and finding it really rather dull. I checked out I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai. It’s supposed to be a gripping murder mystery. The main character is a podcaster in LA and she returns to her New England boarding school to teach a winter mini-mester, where she and others from her class find new evidence that the wrong man is in prison for the murder of a classmate. I read about five chapters of her moaning on about being the kid who didn’t fit in and remembering her time at the school. Not very gripping in my opinion, so I returned it. I’m also trying the first book in a series by James Patterson and Mike Lupica, but it hasn’t really grabbed my interest yet, either. Donna