Reflections · May 28, 2026
A post-Memorial Day reflection from the Maine coast, by way of Dayton, Ohio: a city of flood and flight.
The days have grown delightfully loud, once again, here on Littlejohn Island.
From our house up the hill, we can hear teens gathering on the community dock. Their voices carry easily toward us, and across the water toward Chebeague Island, in the warming air of late May.
Every year, it happens almost overnight. One week, the shoreline feels suspended between seasons, and the next, the island becomes a destination for students who are nearly finished with school and have not yet started summer jobs. Around the same time, the seasonal visitors begin to arrive, and the boat traffic picks up. Through our open windows, we hear the joyful noise of voices paying homage to the lengthening days.
The bird calls are ever-present in the musical mosaic: yellow finches flashing through the trees, robins working the lawn with great purpose, catbirds chattering from the hedges. The warblers seem especially abundant this spring, pausing on their way north as though our island has become a resting place between one destination and another.
The week before Memorial Day, I was in Dayton, Ohio, while my husband attended the large annual Hamvention amateur radio gathering near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
One misty morning, I went out for a run and wandered farther than I meant to. The mist turned to rain, and I soon realized that I no longer knew where I was. I stopped at a light to get my bearings and noticed two things almost at once. Across the street, at a place of worship, a sign in tall letters: BE THE HOPE. In front of me, a soldiers' memorial.
I have been thinking about this juxtaposition ever since. The call to hope on one corner. The sacrifice that makes it necessary on the other.
Every Memorial Day, we sit with that juxtaposition. We remember the sacrifices that service members and their families have made, and we continue to build lives worthy of them.
The call to hope on one corner. The sacrifice that makes it necessary on the other.
Just outside the Wright-Patterson Air Force base stands the Hope Hotel, named for longstanding USO entertainer Bob Hope. The week before Memorial Day, the name felt particularly germane.
The longer I was in the Dayton area, the more fitting it felt to consider this region's repeated reinvention. The city carries the history of the Wright brothers and the first powered flight. It has also seen the rise and decline of major industries, including the National Cash Register company that once defined it. Memorials along the banks of the Great Miami River mark the catastrophic 1913 flood, which reshaped the region and prompted the city to build one of the country's first major flood-control systems. Whole neighborhoods and economies in the Dayton region have reorganized themselves, more than once, in response to forces over which they had no control.
Dayton did not return to what it was. It reconfigured and went on.
My own family has military connections going back almost a century: my father, my grandfathers, six of my siblings, and my brother-in-law have previously served. My daughter's husband and my nephew are still in the military. I have seen the everyday sacrifices military families make to stay ready, knowing they may be called into action at any moment.
I often think of my mother during the years when four of her ten children deployed to conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Four blue stars on the Service Flag.
I also think about the time when my father answered the call to backfill as an Air National Guard physician, serving stateside during the Gulf War. I remember the waiting. I remember my mother's work of continuing ordinary life, including parenting her many children, while part of her heart lived somewhere beyond reach.
My father and all four of my siblings returned home from their assignments, for which my family remains deeply grateful. At the same time, anyone connected to military service understands that the experience of conflict leaves longstanding impressions beyond what we can see.
Still, we adapt to what we do not choose. We hope, despite our circumstances.
Hope is not the same as denial or false optimism. Hope is the choice to keep moving forward, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or physically.
Hope sees that life keeps reinventing itself. Teens still gather on the dock. Summer visitors and homeowners return to the island. The warblers stop a day before flying on. Another class graduates, and the season opens.
Hope sees that life keeps reinventing itself.
We engage in the activities of living and loving others, while knowing how vulnerable that love makes us. We watch them leave, and we trust them to return.
Pause + Reflect: What signs of hope and renewal are you seeing as the season changes?
Reading is never far from my mind, or from my work. I finished This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page earlier this spring. Standing on that corner in Dayton, in the rain, the novel came back to me.
In this book, Tilly Nightingale loses her husband Joe to cancer and discovers he has arranged one last gift for her: a year of books, one each month, waiting at the bookshop they loved.
Each month's book takes Tilly somewhere new, from Paris in April to a bookshop in November. Page weaves travel and reading throughout, which is part of why this book belongs in a post about Dayton.
"The right book in the hands of the right person at exactly the right moment can change their life forever." — Libby Page
A few of the hope-leaning monthly titles, if you're wondering what to read this summer:
For those of you who share a love of reading, co-facilitator Karen Longfellow and I host the seasonally-oriented Bountiful Path Virtual Book Circle. There is no assigned book. Bring whatever you are reading, or come to listen.
The voices we feature here live across our ecosystem, whether you find them in an essay, a Radio Maine conversation, an Off the Wall profile, or a live evening at the Portland Art Gallery. We are grateful for all of your support, and we will continue to find ways to meet you along the path.
Until next time…
May we remember those we have lost, and honor them by continuing.
May we listen for hope in the ordinary sounds of life going on.