Wonderfullest Beginnings

Before I begin this story, I must tell you the end. Because that’s really the beginning. Because it’s a love story.

Charles died. Ann was at his side, as she had been for nearly 50 years. Although he was nearly 20 years her senior, age only complemented their differences. In his maturity was seeded her vitality; in her youth, his experience. Like the opposite dots in the yin and yang symbol. Like her parents’ nicknames for each other—Wig and Wag. Couldn’t have one without the other.

When they met, Ann was my friend, roommate, and traveling companion. Dozens of old photos reveal her as she still is—jeans, ponytail, and Southern manners sparked with a hearty laugh. Just below that surface are extraordinary organizational skills and a singular sense of commitment that served her well in the office where she met Charles—he was her boss. But they married as equals—lovers, best friends, and entrepreneurs.

Capitalizing on that dynamic, they bought the historic Anchor Inn in the charming town of Nantucket off the coast of Cape Cod, a setting well-suited for this romance. That was 1983. The island’s rose-filled salty air defined, entwined, and refined them. It still does.

Known colloquially as the Little Grey Lady of the Sea, the island looks like a comma that wedged itself into the Northern Atlantic. Or as Herman Melville, in the Nantucket-inspired Moby-Dick, instructed, “Take out your map and look at it. See … how it stands there, away off shore … a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background.”

Au contraire, Mr. Melville. Although isolated by five or six thousand years of glacial erosion that swept the elbow 30 miles out to sea, the island and its people are resilient. They boast a proud background. The enclave was home to the Nehantucket tribe of Algonquians before it boomed as a whaling center in the late 17th century, before whaling ebbed and commercial fishing flowed, before tourism emerged, before pride was proud.

The Anchor Inn quietly screams that history, with its cedar-shingled facade, picket fence, and charming nooks. Built as a private home in 1806 by Archaelus Hammond, a whaling captain, it sits on a cobblestoned street just blocks from the ferry that delivers thousands seeking respite in quaint shops and remote, sun-drenched sand dunes.

The inn itself was the setting for the 1954 book Innside Nantucket by Frank Gilbreth, better known for Cheaper by the Dozen. Like the resident innkeepers of Innside, Ann and Charles fell in love with the island and embraced the challenges of running a bed and breakfast in a seasonal resort.

Anchored to the inn and to the community, they kept an even keel for 34 years. For just as a whale swallowed the biblical Jonah, the island of whaling swallowed Ann and Charles. She sat on the zoning committee, founded the local lodging association, and presided over the garden club; Charles served on the Chamber of Commerce but found his niche with the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. As chairman of its board of trustees, he initiated the Boston Pops on Nantucket, an annual fundraising event.

But to the many guests who returned from around the globe year after year, Charles was known for the muffins he baked every morning, and Ann for her executive finesse. Because making people feel at home was who they were. Behind the scenes, they shopped for supplies and made beds when the hired help disappeared. But most of the staff was as dedicated as the innkeepers. Several returned on short notice when Charles got sick. First it was Parkinson’s. Then a broken hip.

For many couples, retirement brings the challenge of spending too much time together, coping with health problems, and deciding where to live. Not so for Ann and Charles. They were best friends first. And problem solvers. They had stumbled upon a snowbird haven near Sarasota after several years of hunkering through the harsh winters, so it was to that tidy island that they retreated two years before Charles died. They renovated it to accommodate his physical needs. They made friends with the neighbors and walked the dog. They spent hours watching the birds outside the sunroom.

But chronic health problems take on their own life. There are appointments to schedule, meds to administer, emergencies to anticipate. Your world gets smaller. They sold the inn and Ann, blessed with logistical skills that would impress a whaling captain, moved their belongings—lock, stock, and barrel—to their southern home, where she is still sorting things out.

Then there was COVID and the world got even smaller. No visitors to ease the burden or proffer a glimpse of the hospitality that once defined them. Yet through it all, Ann’s doting and Charles’s charm endured. She rarely left his side. Until he died. But when he did, she didn’t need to say goodbye. For as Melville observed, “Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs.”

Besides, it wasn’t the end. In that moment—far from where everything began, far from the rose-scented salty air that refined her professional and personal life, far from never having lived alone—a new chapter in Ann’s life story began. And beginnings are hard. Sometimes harder than endings.