The name on the sign

Anita M. Howe

Anita Howe loved having people in the house: family, friends, whoever came up the walk. Her window boxes and her garden ran down to the cove, the chairs were already out on the deck, and there was always a room made up for one more.

The Apple Trees, the family house on the Boothbay water, was hers as much as Guy’s: the dinners, the weddings, the grandchildren in antlers on the deck, the oldest photographs on the refrigerator door. She outlived Guy by many years and kept the house exactly as full.

Anita’s Inn is the name the family gave the white clapboard house at the water’s edge, the inn Boothbay knows as Admiral’s Quarters: a glass solarium, a fire pit on the lawn, rooms that face the harbor, and a garden kept the way she kept hers.