Autumn Years

About the Book

Harry and Vera have lost their long term spouses and are struggling to adjust to life as senior citizens who are single again. They were drawn together when Harry impusively buys an old watercolor in a Maine antique shop. It is in very bad condition and Harry asks Vera, an accomplished artist, to help him restore it. She discovers the watercolor conceals a beautiful oil portrait of a gorgeous woman which a prominent museum in Washington identifies as the work of Winslow Homer. This plunges Harry and Vera into an action packed quest to establish provenance since the circumstances of the discovery suggest it was stolen. Along the way they also unravel the identity of the woman and the story of Homer’s tragic love affair with a girl he met during the peninsula campaign in the Civil War. As they are engaged in their joint enterprise, a lovely Geriatric Romance evolves and comes to fruition when provenance is established and the painting is sold.

About the Author

I am a retired lawyer and have gone through the trauma of transition from active life to retirement and old age. It is an interesting and difficult period. We live longer now and what we do in these Autumn Years is, I think of interest to a mature audience. I also am an admirer of Winslow Homer, a famous 19th century painter and this book is about the passage into the Autumn Years and what we do when we get there. It is also a story of Homer a a fictionalized version of his romantic interest. I know something about these things. I have lived in the Washington area for 83 years before moving to Williamsburg in 2007. I practiced law in Washington for 43 years. The areas of practice were litigation in my younger years evolving into special litigation involving governmental agencies and finally a regulatory agency practice involving issues of regulation of the food, aeronautical and industrial companies. I have always thought of myself as a story teller and amused myself and my six children telling bed time stories when they were young. Recently I took a creative writing course sponsored by William & Mary College and tried my hand with this novel. It is my first attempt.