The Gifts We Need

am writing this letter on the cusp of May. What the world and, in particular, New England will be like when you hold this issue remains a mystery. Will we be walking through the streets of Boston or Providence or Burlington? Will cars be streaming to Cape Cod? Will friends be over for a backyard barbecue? Will we lose ourselves in America’s pastime for a few hours at Fenway Park? Or will we still be doing the hard and essential work of staying home, helping to give everyone the best chance at emerging safely through these rough times?

In the weeks to come, the Yankee staff will be planning the issues we’ll publish months from now, just as we planned this issue during a time that I can barely remember, as if it fell into a hole when I wasn’t looking. But with so many unknowns, I have this certainty: Yankee has been welcomed into readers’ homes since 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, because it offers the enduring stories and images of a New England that people want to know and to see. And this issue and the next one and the one after that will take you there—that’s a promise.

It was also in the 1930s that the writer E.B. White and his wife, Katharine, bought a saltwater farm in the village of Brooklin, Maine. Two decades later they moved from New York to live full-time on the Blue Hill Peninsula, where White wrote some of the most enduring essays and books in American literature, including Charlotte’s Web. What White found among the sea-scented villages was beauty and peacefulness. He famously wrote, “I would really rather feel bad in Maine than good anywhere else,” and he once compared driving across the Maine border to “having received a gift from a true love.” In this issue, our travel feature on the Blue Hill region, “A World Away” [p. 70], opens a window on what remains a tucked-away slice of the Maine coast. Maybe you’ll come sooner, maybe later.

While merely reading about people who fought through hardship may not magically give us the will to do the same, the New Englanders whose stories make up “Resilience, Courage, and Hope” [p. 90] would tell you, if they could, that they were no different than any of us. They did what they needed to do. We are all on a life raft, we are all lost on a mountain, we are all battling the flames—day by day, doing everything we can to make it through.

Finally, we here at Yankee want to hear about people in your own community whose resilience or service to others has inspired you—people who have given you hope, like a gift from a true love. Tell us about them by emailing heroes@yankeepub.com

Mel Allen