Bead of Sand

Bead of Sand
388 Pages
ISBN 978-1-47596-668-8

Rook Westfall likes working at Sennett Lakes Farm Museum - giving hayrides, milking cows, and mucking stalls - even if it does entail manure. But Dad grumbles that he should get a real job instead of escaping into a 19th Century fantasy, and Mum wants another daughter-in-law to contribute to her collection of grandchildren.

Jiminy! Can’t a guy just live?

Rook’s tranquil world somersaults, however, when he runs afoul of the Saltkill Gang during a violent storm. Stacy Morgan, a Civil War reenactor, interrupts the gang’s attack, when she stumbles onto the museum grounds. After rescuing Rook, she joins the museum’s seasonal staff, but her private demons keep Rook at arm’s length. A prickly friendship emerges between them as she reveals her tragic secrets, a trust the depths of which Rook can’t fathom until she’s gone. When Stacy leaves at season’s end, neither she nor Rook realizes that she takes with her a gift that will surprise them all.

Set in a remote finger of the Adirondacks, with a winsome six-year-old, a reformed delinquent, and a wild nonagenarian, Bead of Sand is a novel of discovery and fulfillment, in a place where the past too easily overshadows the present.

Sally M. Chetwynd

About Sally M. Chetwynd (Boston, Massachusetts Author)

Sally M. Chetwynd

I grew up in rural Maine and New Hampshire, spending summers on a Maine coastal island. From my lighthouse keeping and mariner ancestors, I inherited the salt of the sea in my blood. The scent of the sea is nectar. Life has led me through varied professions—land use planning, pipefitting, and engineering drafting.

The Bicentennial of the American Revolution launched me into reenacting, where I learned fife and drum as well as other aspects of 18th Century military life. Here I met my husband Phillip, and we soon transferred to the Civil War. He took on the role of Abraham Lincoln, whom he has portrayed from the Cub Scouts to the White House, and I took on Sam, a military musician and engineer, constructing signal towers, launching pontoons, and measuring with a surveyor’s chain. Check out YouTube for “Private Sam Engineer” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Y9ZICXCIs).

Always, I have written, vocationally and avocationally, some of it published—studies and reports, poetry, short stories, biographical profiles, and my blog on 19th Century American history (www.brasscastlearts.blogspot.com). Reenacting inspired "Bead of Sand," a contemporary novel (2013). "The Sturgeon’s Dance," set in rural Maine in the 1980s, came out in 2018. Although I intended to work next on an historical novel about cadet life at the US Naval Academy during the Civil War, the completion of "The Sturgeon's Dance" has set me in the direction of non-fiction. "Beyond End of Watch" will delve into the 1964 death of a police officer in the small town of South Berwick, Maine, and its immediate aftermath and long-term repercussions for his family and community.

Phillip and I live in Wakefield, MA. We were once members of a pack led by a demented dog of demonic disposition, but His Fierceness recently moved on to doggie heaven, if there is one. To give him full credit, he did his best to eat the attending veterinarian in his last hour. Now he is catching all the rabbits he couldn't in this world.

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