Keys’s Substack

The Honest Summer, Part Two

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:11:53 GMT

Labor Day is not the day summer ends here in the Lakes Region. The calendar wants you to believe otherwise and the calendar is wrong, even if it is the end of summer in most places. Don’t get me wrong, the kids are back in school as of today (which will positively impact both my grocery bill and my overall equanimity). We will all return to routine from Monday-Friday. The weekends, though. The weekends keep coming through foliage season. Somebody will still be circling for parking on Main Streets in mid-October, tourists will still order a lobster roll like it’s July, visitors will still slow down traffic on the unfamilar twists and turns of our country roads while they gawk at the staggering beauty that surrounds us. Summer doesn’t end on this long weekend in September.

Here is what the beginning of the end of summer feels like, and I know because it happened to me this morning.

I met a friend for coffee at North Main Cafe (try the Almond Cake), on Main Street in Wolfeboro, and I parked right in front. Not near the front. In front. Then I drove two blocks to my office and parked right in front of that too, which in July would have taken me fifteen minutes and a breathing exercise I learned in therapy. I didn’t think much of it today; I just found a spot twice in one morning without circling once.

That’s the tell. Not a quiet street. Not an empty beach. A woman getting two parking spots on Main Street before ten a.m., the week of Labor Day, and feeling almost smug about it.

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That’s how I know this is home now, even though I haven’t hit the two decade mark that seems to count with those who grew up here. Not because anyone said something so much as because I felt it. I clocked the season turning on Main Street before anyone told me it had, the way you know a friend’s mood has shifted before they’ve said a word. Nobody posted about it. Nobody sent a text announcing the tourists were thinning out. I just parked twice without trying and knew this is it.

The parking monitor hasn’t caught up yet, which is its own kind of proof. He is still out there chalking tires in yellow, still working the two-hour rule with the same love for rules he brought to it the week of July 4th, when there wasn’t a spot to be had for love or money. So for one more week I will begrudgingly go move my car at the appropriate interval, for a rule that no longer needs enforcing, because the street has emptied out faster than the systems built to manage it. That gap, the lag between a place quieting down and the place noticing it’s quieted down, might be the truest image I have for this whole stretch of September.

Because the visitors haven’t left. They’ve retreated to the weekend, which is a different thing entirely, and worth being honest about. If you come through Wolfeboro on a Saturday in the next eight weeks, you will still wait for a table. You will still see the Mount Washington pull out with a full load and sound her horn like she means it, same as she did on the Fourth. The lake will still be doing its lake things on both sides of the parking question, Winnipeesaukee crowded and busy, Wentworth and Lovell keeping to themselves the way they always have. Weekends, for now, still belong partly to somebody else.

But Monday through Friday. Those are mostly ours again.

That’s the part I didn’t expect to feel as sharply as I do. It’s not that the season ends. It’s that I get five out of seven days of it back, and the two I don’t get back are the two I was least attached to anyway. I don’t need Saturday morning at Lino’s to have space at the counter. I need Thursday morning to be mine, and this week, for the first time since May, it will be.

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I was standing on my back stairs this morning, watching the dogs wrestle in the wet grass, when the knitting circle text came through. Seven words: My house, Thursday, bring your current project. Not an invitation, as assumption that we all know what that all means. I stood there a second longer than the text warranted, picturing the women I haven’t seen except in passing for the last three months, circled around the kitchen table by the window, a dog under somebody’s chair, the particular buzz and contentment of a room where everyone’s hands are busy and nobody has to perform being interesting. I didn’t carefully compose a text back. I gave it a thumbs up and watched 6 others roll in. More importantly, I felt my shoulders drop about an inch, which is apparently what late August has been costing me without my noticing.

Keys’s Substack

The Honest Summer

2 months ago · Keys to the Lakes

I want to resist the tidy version of this, the one where the town exhales and goes still and even though we all love summer here so much, we all rejoice in the emptier streets and quieter lakes. That’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is more complex and, I think, more honest: the retiree down the road hasn’t felt any of this at all, because her days were never on the visitor’s clock to begin with, and she’ll tell you as much if you ask, mildly amused that the rest of us are only now catching up to a rhythm she just always lives in. The visitor’s week has shrunk from seven days to two. And my week, the year-rounder week, the one built around driving to showings and back and squeezing errands into the gaps, that week just got more expansive and generous and quieter all at once.

So no, I won’t tell you it’s gone quiet, because for the next eight weeks it will still be loud again on a Saturday and I’ll be back to circling for that same spot in front of North Main. And anyway, life here in the fall and winter is so rich and varied and busy in a different way than summer. What I’ll tell you instead is smaller and more specific. This morning I parked twice on Main Street without trying, and for one more week, I still have to go move my car from one spot to another. By next Tuesday, I won’t have to. That’s the whole shift, right there. Not an ending. A door opening five days at a time, the season still holding onto weekends for now.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

What’s Happening in the Lakes Region This September

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 19:52:00 GMT

There’s a particular hour in September, usually somewhere past six, when the sun drops low enough that it stops lighting the lake from above and starts lighting it from the horizon, and everything on the water turns the color of a brass fitting left out in weather. It doesn’t last. Twenty minutes, maybe. But it’s the light that tells you the season has turned even before the maples do, before the mornings reliably need a sweater, before the marina starts hauling boats. You bask in the beauty of the shift before it’s fully landed in your body.

The weekdays are the tell. Today I found a parking spot more quickly than I have since May. The kid who’s been scooping ice cream all summer told me his last day is next Tuesday. He wants a few days of true vacation before he’s back at practices and in classrooms. But come Friday, the docks fill again, the parking lots along 16 and main streets in towns all over are worse than they ever were in peak season (because leaves, people). September isn’t the season ending. It’s the season getting particular about which days it shows up for.

In the meantime, there is, it turns out, an enormous amount happening. Concerts and craft fairs and a five-hour boxing fundraiser and a faire for pagans and a parade made entirely of lantern light on a lake that used to be a farm. Here’s a selection from the month. As always, let me know what I’ve missed that I should know about by leaving a comment!

The Social Life You Didn’t Expect

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:09:22 GMT

Nobody warns you how hard it is to make friends as an adult. You spend your twenties and thirties collecting people through sheer proximity, coworkers, other parents at pickup, the guy two cubicles over who becomes a groomsman, and then one day you look up and realize you haven’t had to try in fifteen years. Then you move somewhere new, or your kids stop needing you every afternoon, or both, and you discover that the skill atrophied the whole time you weren’t using it.

I’m forty-seven. I’m definitely not retired. My kids are mostly self-sufficient, I’m still fairly new to this area, and I like trying new things, and it turns out that’s plenty of reason to call this my own third chapter even without a gold watch involved. A little over a year ago I joined the Lakes Region Newcomers Club, mostly because I wanted to meet people and didn’t have a better plan than that. I was a little worried that because I had already lived here for a year, and been vacationing here for 15, I might not fit the criteria. Turns out, I needed have worried. There are members in the group who first joined twenty years ago…but its just that much fun.

The club itself is a large, well-organized thing. There’s a governance committee and bylaws, which sounds almost comically formal for an organization whose real function is helping people not eat lunch alone, but the structure is what lets each group underneath it run itself differently without the whole thing falling apart. Some groups are outdoorsy, some are social, some exist entirely around a shared, specific interest. What they have in common is that nobody’s checking whether you showed up last time, they’re just checking that you’re making a connection.

I just agreed to co-lead the Creative Writing group for the next year or so, which meets once a month, usually at a coffee shop or in a room at the Wolfeboro library. Someone in the group picks a theme, everyone writes a piece to it over the following weeks, and then we read our pages aloud and offer feedback using roses, thorns, and buds, what worked, what didn’t, and what has potential if it’s pushed further. Some of the members are published writers. Most of us are just imaginative neighbors who wanted somewhere to put the sentences. We’re adding poetry open mic nights at local restaurants this winter, which feels like the group stretching in new ways.

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I’m also a fair regular at Lunch Bunch, which is exactly what it sounds like, a different restaurant somewhere in the region every month, everyone orders and pays for their own meal, and the whole appeal is that you never know who’s going to end up across the table from you. I’ve dipped into the knitting group too, which meets a couple of times a month at various members’ homes, welcomes total beginners next to genuine experts, and is where I learned that I’m what’s called a process knitter. I love the feel of it, the calm of knit and purl, and I have never finished a single project. Not one. The group didn’t seem to think that was strange, though they did offer to help me out if I ever decide I need to cast off instead of just casting on. Apparently a lot of knitting is just knitting. And a lot of people are really just welcoming.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you going in: some members join one group and that’s their whole social world, and that’s enough for them. I turned out to be a dabbler. I flit between groups, show up to some events more than others, and the connections vary in depth accordingly. But a few of the women from Creative Writing have become people I genuinely can’t imagine not knowing now. We started going to trivia together outside of the writing group entirely, and somewhere along the way we pulled in a friend one of us made through the mindful movement group, and another who came from the wine SIG. The newcomers club didn’t introduce us to each other directly so much as it kept putting us in rooms until we did the rest ourselves.

Thanks for reading Keys’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.

That’s really the point, and it took me a while to see it clearly. It isn’t about finishing the sweater or making every meeting or racking up some tally of groups joined. It’s about putting yourself in front of other people who have also chosen this place, on purpose, at whatever stage of life brought them here, and letting some of those encounters turn into something that outlasts the original reason you showed up.

If you’re weighing a move here and wondering whether you’d actually find your people, whatever chapter you’d be arriving in, this is some of what that can look like from the inside. Not automatic, not instant, but real, and it’s there if you’re willing to show up more than once.

And if you would like to come share a poem or grab lunch, let me know; I would love to introduce you to 250 of my nearest and dearest neighbors.

🧭 Jenn, Keys to the Lakes

This is part of an ongoing series about what the third chapter of life actually looks like in the Lakes Region, for the people who chose it.

Read This, And Then Forget I Told You

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 20:47:13 GMT

Nestled about midway between the restaurants, ski resorts, and campgrounds of Conway and “America’s Oldest Summer Resort” is one of New Hampshire’s most character-rich small towns: rural, artsy, outdoorsy, and proudly unpolished. It’s the kind of place where the diner pulls double duty as the news desk, where a dirt road can lead to either a working farm or a view of Chocorua that stops you mid-sentence, and where the theater on Main Street has been running longer than most towns twice its size have had a theater at all.

Most people driving through don’t stop. Most people who’ve heard of this region at all have heard of Winnipesaukee, or Wolfeboro, or North Conway if they lean more snow than water. Tamworth isn’t on that list, and I kind of really love that about it.

Here’s the thing about a town in the middle. Everyone assumes it’s a compromise, the place you settle for when you can’t have the lake and can’t have the mountains either. It’s not. It’s the answer to a question most people don’t know to ask: do you actually have to choose between the two, or do you just think you have to?

The feel of the place

Tamworth is small on paper, about 2,800 people spread across five villages: Tamworth Village itself, Chocorua, South Tamworth, Wonalancet, and Whittier. But it doesn’t read as a satellite of anywhere. It’s not a quieter Winnipesaukee lake town and it’s not a budget North Conway. It has its own multiverse with at least three different centers of gravity: working farms and growers, artists and theater people, and people who love the great outdoors, whether part of the year or always. And one of the coolest parts is that these groups all coexist in a way that mostly works because everyone love the place wholeheartedly. Nobody moves to Tamworth by accident.

The theater is the tell

Let’s start with the Barnstormers. It’s easy to drive through Tamworth Village, see the white church and the little brick library and assume you’re looking at a postcard with no substance behind it. Or the well-preserved memory of how life used to be. Then you find out the theater on Main Street has been running since 1931, that it’s the oldest continuously operating professional summer theatre in the country, and that it was founded by Grover Cleveland’s son in a converted general store. Eight shows, eight consecutive weeks, every summer, one of only three Equity houses in the entire state. That’s not a hobby or someone’s vanity project. That’s a town that decided, almost a century ago, that culture wasn’t something they wanted to have to drive to Boston for. And then they’ve decided, year after year, to fund it, support it, and enjoy it.

I bring this up first because it tells you what kind of place this actually is. Not “cute.” Not “quaint,” a word I try to avoid because it usually means some city person can’t imagine living there (mea culpa — used to use this word to describe coastal Maine all the time, my bad.) The Arts Council runs a live painting competition every spring where artists work in different media on the same subject in real time. It’s a wonder to watch, whether you have any artistic talent yourself or not. The Remick farm has been worked for over two hundred years and will let you wander pastures with grazing cows, then walk you through a doctor’s office frozen at 1935. The distillery on the edge of the village makes gin from foraged pine resin and a whiskey aged with venison in it, which sounds like a bit until you taste it and realize they’re not joking around. This is a town with two libraries for 2,800 people. That ratio tells you something.

The honest part

Tamworth is not a lake town in the way that countless other towns around here are. Chocorua Lake is small, stunning, and mostly conserved land with no motors allowed, which gets you the single best reflection of a mountain you’ll find in this state and almost no boat traffic to go with it. White Lake State Park gives you public swimming and camping, which is lovely and also not the same as owning a dock. If your version of lake life involves a boat lift and a slip with your name on it, you want Winnipesaukee or one of the approximately 20 other lakes where people boat in the region.

There’s a broader honesty worth naming too. This is a lifestyle town, not a convenience town, and that cuts both ways. You’ll drive for most errands, for a wider entertainment selection, for specialty retail, for anything beyond urgent care. Realistically, you’ll have to drive for groceries unless you are very intentional about eating locally and seasonally…and know how to can vegetables. Expect wells and septic instead of town water and sewer on a lot of properties, dirt roads that need real winter maintenance, and internet that should be evaluated as part of your due diligence the same way roofs and chimneys are. None of that is a flaw exactly. It’s just what “unpolished” actually means. Older homes here tend to be full of character and full of questions, so evaluating systems, age, and access matters more than it would in a subdivision with a homeowners’ association telling everyone what color to paint the shutters.

What you get in return is proximity without the premium and a beauty and pace of life that cannot be measured in property values. Conway is about twenty five minutes away for groceries, hardware, and the hospital. Wolfeboro, with its marinas and its lake-town crowds, is roughly thirty-five minutes the other direction. That’s what makes Tamworth a real sweet spot: most towns in this region force you to plant a flag on one side, lake or mountains, and commit. Tamworth lets you keep a foot in both without a punishing drive either way. It’s inland enough to feel like its own place, not a suburb of anything, and close enough to both worlds that you’re never actually cut off from either one.

Where to eat

The food scene here is all about quality over quantity, and I mean that as a compliment more than a caveat. You won’t have twenty dinner options. What you’ll have is a handful of dependable, well-loved spots, supplemented by whatever the farmers market and the farm stands are doing that week.

Rosie’s Restaurant is the practical local favorite, breakfast and lunch, homemade pie, the kind of diner where you’ll recognize half the room. Its the no-fuss version of Tamworth. The Other Bakery on Main Street, which most people still call Tamworth Bakery out of habit, is probably the strongest everyday stop in the village: good espresso, real bread, a savory lunch, Wednesday morning live music that turns into an informal town jam session. For a dinner out that would rival anything you’ll find on the Big Lake or in the Whites, Public House on Page Hill in Chocorua is the clear choice. Its a rustic gastropub with mountain views and a seasonal, locally sourced menu. Lots of people would say its not an every night place, but its probably the only place I ever order the chicken because its just that good. Everything else is great too, but the pan-roasted chicken never fails to delight.

Beyond that, its mostly insider knowledge. Sunnyfield Bakery sells bread through the farmers market and a few village shops rather than running its own storefront. White Gates Farm is worth knowing if you’re cooking for yourself and want to build a meal from what’s actually grown nearby. G III Deli on Route 16 is your reliable grab and go, full deli, pizza, beer, wine, long hours, not a destination so much as a relief when you need one. Songbird gives you familiar Chinese takeout. And Tamworth Distilling’s tasting room, open mainly Friday through Sunday, is a genuinely good place to sit by the river with a flight of something strange and delicious.

If I had one food day here, I’d start with coffee and an omelet at Rosies, hit the Saturday farmers market for the week’s produce, grab lunch at The Other Bakery, pop into the Distillery for a Gin cocktail for happy hour and then gorge myself at Public House on Page Hill for dinner. Good bread, farm food, a diner breakfast, and a truly excellent meal. That’s Tamworth’s food identity in a sentence: quality over quantity, and worth planning around rather than expecting to stumble into.

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The part where I confess

I sell real estate here. So there’s an obvious problem with a piece that opens by telling you to forget about this well-kept secret. I mean, I definitely want you all to come be my neighbors down the road…and maybe let me crash after an evening at the Barnstormers followed by a nightcap at the Distillery.

I’m not going to pretend the tension between being happy to help you find a home in Tamworth and not letting the Tamworth is Great cat out of the bag doesn’t exist. Truth is, I’m not worried about the right person finding Tamworth. I’m worried about too many people finding it. I’m worried about the version of this story where a place gets discovered the way a good trail gets discovered, and within a few years the thing that made it good is the thing that’s gone. Not because anyone did anything wrong. Just because enough people showed up wanting the postcard instead of the place, and the postcard is easier to buy into than the place is to keep.

So if you’ve read this far and you’re already picturing yourself at Rosie’s on a cold winter morning, or you know exactly why a town with two libraries for 2,800 people is a flex and not a fun fact, you’re probably not what makes me nervous. You’re the reason towns like this survive, not the reason they stop being themselves. Come learn the dirt roads. Go to town meeting. Don’t ask anyone to pave anything for your convenience.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

What a Blank Slate Actually Costs

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 19:50:11 GMT

We started this series looking at water access under $500K. From there it was the $750K tier, then multi-million-dollar waterfront, then what your money buys once you step away from the water entirely, and we took a look at old farmhouses as a type. This installment is a different kind of turn: not a price tier, not even a property type in the usual sense. This time we’re looking at land.

People contact me to talk about buying land all the time. Most of the time, they’re long term investors and they’re pretty knowledgable about what buying land means. Sometimes, they’re looking to see what a parcel they’ve been sitting on for a decade or so is currently worth. But sometimes, it’s a different conversation.

Every so often, a buyer I’ve been working with tells me some version of the same thing after we’ve seen a few houses together. They’ve been through six houses that were almost right. The kitchen was renovated but the layout made no sense. The bones were good but the price seemed way too high for the amount of renovations they would need to make to be excited about the home. The one they actually loved got outbid by cash before they finished their coffee.

So they start thinking about land instead. Sometimes they quote country music songs: just buy the dirt, they say. Build exactly what we want. No compromises, no previous owner’s decisions to undo, no inspection report full of things somebody else let slide for twenty years. And when you’ve been looking at houses in the high $700s, land can feel cheap and easy.

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I understand the appeal completely. I also think it’s worth saying clearly, before anyone gets too far into the daydream: land is not a blank slate. It just hasn’t told you what it costs yet. If real estate were a game, buying a house is poker and buying land is roulette. Poker rewards what you know. Roulette doesn't care what you know; the wheel was already weighted before you sat down, you just can't see how. That's land. The wetlands, the ledge, the soil that won't pass a perc test, all of it was decided a long time ago. You're not going to outwit the house; you’re just deciding whether you want to play.

I pulled five parcels currently for sale across Belknap and Carroll counties, priced from just under $100,000 to just under a million dollars. Not because acreage or location matter more than everything else, but because together they make the same point from different angles. The price of land and the cost of land are two different numbers, and the gap between them is where all the real decisions live.

Wakefield — 00 Leighton Corner Road, MLS #5101256, 6.57 acres, $99,900. This is the number that gets people excited, the one that makes land feel like the obvious answer to a house market that makes buyers feel defeated. And it’s a genuinely nice parcel: surveyed, wildlife and trails nearby, close enough to North Conway and the Seacoast to feel central rather than remote. But the listing itself notes wetlands on the property, with the buildable area sited outside the flood zone to work around them. Water source is listed as unknown. None of that means walk away. It means before this number means anything, you need a wetlands delineation and a real answer on where your well goes, because “outside the flood zone” and “easy to build on” aren’t the same sentence.

Sanbornton — Lot 9-1 Roxbury Road, MLS #5105403, 5.00 acres, $169,900. This one is freshly cleared and subdivided off Roxbury Road, which means nothing has been tested yet. No well dug, no septic designed, no proof that the ground under those trees will support the house you're already picturing. That puts you at a fork before you've even made an offer. Either you buy on faith, betting that a lot this size in this location will work out, or you pay to find out first, which means testing land you might not end up owning. A perc test in New Hampshire typically runs $750 to $1,900, sometimes more if the site needs multiple test holes. A well is the bigger unknown: this part of the state sits on granite bedrock, and a complete system, drilling, casing, pump, the works, commonly lands between $5,000 and $20,000, occasionally more if the driller has to go deep to hit water. Neither of those tells you what a septic system will ultimately cost to install once it's designed, only what it costs to find out if you can. That's the real choice on a lot like this: speculate and hope, or spend a few thousand dollars just to stop guessing.

Moultonborough — 00 Gilman Point Road (Unit/Lot 2), MLS #5102302, 8.38 acres, $195,000. This one has done more homework than the first two. It's surveyed, with 327 feet of road frontage, and it's already been perc tested with data on file good for a four bedroom system. That's not nothing. Somebody spent real money finding that out so you don't have to gamble on it. The tradeoff: it can't be subdivided further, so what you see is what you get. And the road access is a mix of association, private, and public maintained sections, which is worth understanding before you assume year round plow service is guaranteed. Public maintained means the town shows up. The other two mean someone else does, or nobody has agreed on it in writing, and you don't want to find that out in the middle of a February storm.

Meredith — Lot 1 Winona Road, MLS #5093680, 7.79 acres, $235,000. The most finished of the four. Surveyed, paved public road frontage, and the home site and driveway have already been cleared, which saves real money before you’ve broken ground on anything else. It’s close to the Meredith town docks and has beach access to Lake Winnipesaukee, though that access is for municipal residents generally, which is worth knowing before anyone pictures private waterfront that isn’t actually part of the deal. There’s also a current use penalty the buyer will owe at closing, a relatively minor but real additional cost before your builder has so much as drafted a site plan.

And then there’s the one that changes the whole conversation.

Wolfeboro — 580 C Pine Hill Road, MLS #5091791, 20 acres, $980,000. Nearly a million dollars, and it isn’t even a finished lot yet. It hasn’t been surveyed. It’s being offered as part of a planned subdivision that hasn’t happened, on what the listing calls a risk free reservation, meaning you’re securing your spot in a plan, not purchasing a parcel with drawn boundaries. At roughly $49,000 an acre, it’s priced well above everything else on this list, largely for the view and the proximity to town and the lake. But price per acre and readiness per acre are not the same thing. You can spend more money here than on any other parcel in this piece and still be, in the most literal sense, waiting to find out exactly what you bought.

That’s the thing nobody tells you when land starts to look like the easy way out of a frustrating house search. The sticker price is never the real number. Every one of these parcels needs a well, unless one exists. A septic system, designed and approved. A driveway, cleared and graded. Power brought in from the road, sometimes a significant distance. Permitting timelines that don’t care how ready you feel. And then the actual build, at construction costs that have not gotten friendlier in the last few years.

None of that makes land a bad idea. People do this well all the time, and it can become exactly the right answer when the existing housing stock genuinely can’t give you what you need. But it only works when you go in knowing the land is not the finish line. It’s the starting line, and the real number is whatever the finish line ends up costing once you get there. And it only works if you’re okay with a lot of unknowns and have the stamina, the disposition, and the budget to roll with the punches. Because I’ve never heard of a custom build that didn’t leave everyone involved just a little bit bruised and bloody.

Thanks for reading Keys’s Substack! This post is public so feel free to share it.

This series has moved through water access, price tiers, waterfront, and now land itself, and the thread underneath all of it is the same: the number on the listing is never the whole answer. Next up, we’ll get back to standing structures with a look at what it actually takes to buy a property as a vacation rental investment.

If you’re circling the idea of building instead of buying, I’m always happy to walk through what a specific parcel would actually take to bring to life; the wells and the septic and the permitting and all of it, before you fall in love with an acreage number or a dream house design that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Here’s to knowing what you’re in for, or that you’re in for whatever happens.
🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Summer Sunday

Keys to the Lakes — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:32:53 GMT

Hey neighbors,

It’s absolutely gorgeous out there, so I’m taking the day to squeeze every moment of summer out.

That’s one thing a long winter teaches you. Bask in the warmth while you can.

Here’s a picture of moonrise over Lake Winni last night. Full of gratitude for where I get to call home.

Here’s to appreciating the moment you’re in.

Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

On Knowing You've Found the Right Place

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:31:23 GMT

People ask me how I knew. Usually over coffee, usually somewhere in the second half of the conversation, after the practical questions are out of the way. Square footage, taxes, how far to a real grocery store. Then it comes, almost apologetic. But how did you actually know? I can tell its coming from a place of curiosity tinged with a little anxiety. No one wants to make a million dollar, cross-country mistake.

I’ve written about the pull before. The image that keeps arriving uninvited. I still believe in that. But I’ve started to notice it’s an incomplete answer, because it only covers the first half of the question. The pull tells you something that is worth trusting; its recognizing something you need or want and that some particular place has that thing. And, if you listen to it, you might end up sitting across from me at one of the 5 coffee shops in the region (we’re not counting, Dunks, sorry Boston readers) talking about how you’re not quite sure, but you think a life on the lake or in the woods might be calling to you.

But once you’ve made the move, the pull goes quiet and it doesn’t tell you whether you were right to trust it. That verdict, if there is one, doesn’t arrive at the closing table. It doesn’t arrive on moving day, or even in that strange, held-breath first winter. It arrives later, sideways, usually while you’re doing something else entirely. And it arrives over and over again.

Here’s what I mean by “you’ll just know” being an incomplete answer. When I moved, I knew what I wanted. Quiet. Land. A house with some age on it, something with a story I could become a part of instead of a subdivision where I would have every opportunity to be an anonymous blip in the life of the neighborhood. I got all of it. By any reasonable measure, the place I found (both the house and the area) matched the list. And for a while I thought that was the whole test. Did it deliver what I came for. Mission accomplished.

That’s not actually how I know now. For the first year or so, that was enough. I wanted this, I got this, I’m happy with my life. What I’ve noticed, three years in, is that the place stopped agreeing with my list somewhere along the way. Not by withholding what I asked for. By checking those boxes and then quietly replacing the list with a new one, an expanded one, and not asking my permission first.

I did not move here to cooperatively farm and raise chickens, especially not for meat. That wasn’t on any version of the list, not even a stretch goal. I moved here for a certain kind of quiet, and somewhere in year two I found myself standing in the yard with my neighbor, doing something I would have found completely alien three years earlier, and not just tolerating it. Wanting to be good at it. Caring whether I was doing right by the animals we were processing in a way that had nothing to do with efficiency or homesteading aesthetics and everything to do with some new part of me that apparently needed this particular kind of connection and identity.

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Nobody warns you that this happens. That the place doesn’t just satisfy the person who arrived. It goes to work on her. Quietly, without asking, it starts handing you wants you didn’t order. And the strange test, the one I think actually answers the question people are asking me over coffee, is whether you’re willing to let it. Or maybe more, whether you’re excited by the evolution.

Because there’s a version of this that goes the other way. I’ve watched it happen to people who moved for a feeling and then spent years defending the version of themselves that had the feeling, refusing every single thing the place tried to hand them instead. Still commuting to the old identity two, three, five years in. Still narrating the move in the past tense, like it was a decision made once and then preserved under glass. Still mourning cocktails after 9 and food delivery instead of embracing breakfast on the farm down the road at 8 am and a bonfire held by the lake association where everyone brings a thermos. Holding on to what was while going through the motions of being here is not rightness. That’s just relocation with the furniture rearranged.

I don’t think you find out a place is right by checking whether it gave you what you asked for. I think you find out by noticing, later, that whatever it was that you thought you wanted, what you got continues to be the thing that makes you thrilled to be here.

I used to think of the farmhouse as a fixer-upper I was patient enough to take on. That was the frame I had when I signed. A project with a timeline, however loose. I have slowly stopped believing that frame is even accurate. Somewhere in the last year I noticed I have quit thinking of the unfinished rooms as unfinished and started thinking of them as not yet, which is a completely different posture toward the same pile of lath and horsehair plaster. The want shifted from get this done to something closer to get to keep doing this, which is not a want I moved in with. It’s one the house gave me. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that past owners, all of whom stuck around for 30 years or more, were given the same posture.

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I still have a morning ritual I do most days. But its a little different than it used to be. Rather than reading the Times while I have my coffee, the dogs underfoot, I read sound of the crows in the trees, and the roosters continued attempts to crow (he’s almost got it!), and the what the color of the sunrise portends for what the day is going hand me. I get to the Times eventually, but I realized what is happening on my 10 acres gives me joy in a way that what is happening elsewhere doesn’t. I bring this up not because I think a place hands you epiphanies on schedule, it doesn’t, but because that practice is where I actually catch these shifts happening. Not in some big cinematic realization. In the small, boring recognition that the question I’m sitting with this morning isn’t the question I was sitting with a year ago, and I never consciously decided to trade one for the other.

So if you’re asking how you know, and you’ve already found your version of the pull, here’s the most honest answer I have for you now, though fair warning, it will probably change again when I’m 5 years in, or 10, or 30. You don’t know once and for always. You know over and over again, if its right. You know the first time when something inside you recognizes the place before you can explain it. You know the second time, later, quieter, when you notice the place has been rewriting what you wanted the whole time you weren’t looking, and instead of resisting the edit, you signed off on it without even registering the moment you did. And then you know again, each time you realize you’re not entirely who you used to be, but you’re happier than ever.

Keys’s Substack

What A Place Already Knows About You

There’s a moment that happens to a lot of people somewhere in the middle of their search for what’s next, whether it’s a move or a new job or a lifestyle change. They’ve done the reading. They’ve spent weekends visiting or trying on some new place or activity or way of being. They’ve sat with the spreadsheet and the comparables and the pros and cons lis…

3 months ago · Keys to the Lakes

That last kind of knowing doesn’t feel like a verdict. It doesn’t arrive with any fanfare. It feels like standing in your yard doing something you never planned on, fully invested in getting it right, and only realizing afterward that you used to be someone who wouldn’t have understood why.

The right place was never going to just meet you where you are. If it’s actually right, it’s going to move you, and you won’t notice until you’re already standing somewhere new.

If you're mid-move, or mid-decision, and wondering whether the pull was right — I've had this exact conversation more times than I can count, and I'd like to have it with you too.

Here’s to the wants you didn’t put on the wish list, and the ones you’re glad you got anyway.

🧭 Jenn
Keys to the Lakes

Music, Music, Everywhere

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:38:59 GMT

So some of you know and others will be surprised to learn that I grew up in Nashville, TN. Which might be why y’all occasionally slips into my vernacular. First of all, yes I know Nashville is super cool now. Trust me when I say it was very different when I spent the first 18 years of my life there. Also, I first learned about NBe Nashville I get to visit as an adult is music. Music everywhere and about 80% of it amazing.

Now, it was pretty hard growing up in Music City as someone with no musical talent whatsoever. I went to high school with kids whose parents were eplatinum artists and I was a theater kid who had to sit out the musical every spring. Despite having no sense of rhythm and actually being tone deaf, growing up in Nashville gave me a deep appreciation for music of all genres. And sitting on the grass or at a table in a small venue being a part of the communion that happens when rare talent meets appreciative audience is something I’ll never get tired of.

That’s the experience I’m chasing for the rest of this summer, and it turns out I don’t have to go far to find it. Some of it is fifteen minutes down the road on a bandstand that’s been standing since long before I stood in the corner of the Bluebird Cafe back in Nashville hoping no one would card me…or ask me to sing. Some of it means driving to a mountaintop tent, or southeast to the seacoast, or paying real money to stand on grass and watch someone famous. All of it is worth the trip. Here’s where I’m pointing the car.

The Big Lawns

Big concerts aren’t really my thing, but we do have one of the best venues for them right in our backyard. BankNH Pavilion in Gilford is where the Lakes Region goes when it wants an actual concert experience, the kind with a real sound system and $50 sweatshirts to commerate the tour and eight thousand of your closest strangers singing or shouting or dancing alongside you. The lineup for what’s left of the season is stacked.

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Mumford & Sons play Saturday, August 15th at 7:30 PM, with Medium Build opening. Koe Wetzel comes through the night before, Friday the 14th at 6:45 PM, with Shane Smith & The Saints. Zach Top gets two nights at the end of the month, Friday the 28th with Marcus King and Saturday the 29th solo, both at 7 PM, if you want to see what a twenty-something is doing to modern country music that actually sounds like it has roots. I considered breaking my no big venues rule for Ella Langely who played here a couple weeks ago, but waited too long and couldn’t get a ticket.

September opens with Parker McCollum on the 4th, then ZZ Top with George Thorogood & The Destroyers on the 5th, then Tedeschi Trucks Band with Lukas Nelson on the 6th, which might be the best three nights in a row this venue books all year. Hayley Williams plays Monday, September 14th at 7 PM, and Dan + Shay close out the run on Friday the 18th at 7:30, touring behind their new record.

Lawn seats are the move if the forecast holds. Bring a real chair, not a beach towel. You’ll thank yourself around hour two. There’s a real tailgate culture before shows and anyone driving through Gilford at 5 pm when the parking opens or 11 pm when the town insists shows be done by knows that you’ll be part of a crawl of headlights through Alton and back to 16 to get anywhere. Its worth it.

What’s Already Yours

Before you spend a dollar, know that some of the best music this region produces all summer is free, and most of us who live here forget to go.

Wolfeboro’s Cate Park Bandstand runs its concert series on Saturday evenings through August, 7 to 9 PM, right on the Lake Winnipesaukee waterfront. Bring a blanket. It’s weather-dependent with no rain date, so check the Friends of the Wolfeboro Community Bandstand site before you drive over.

Alton Bay has its own bandstand series most weeks through the end of August, evenings on the water. Laconia runs two things worth knowing: Concerts on Canal, on Canal Street, and the Belknap Mill’s Arts in the Park series on Friday nights. Center Harbor’s Bicentennial Bandstand hosts the Center Harbor Town Band on Fridays, which somebody once told me is the closest thing the Lakes Region has to the Boston Pops, and having heard them, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Wakefield does concerts at Turntable Park next to the railroad tracks but their last one is tomorrow 8/12 (Ricky and the Giants).

None of this requires a ticket. It requires showing up.

Under the Tent in the Clouds

Great Waters is celebrating its 30th season this year, and if you haven’t been to a show at Castle in the Clouds, you’re missing one of the actual signature experiences of living here. Concerts in the Clouds happens under a white tent at the Castle in Moultonborough, with the Belknap range doing most of the scenery work as the sun goes down. Concerts in Town happens at Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, right on the water. Both series run through August. Tickets and the current lineup are at greatwaters.org, and it’s worth checking now, because the good nights sell out.

Worth the Drive Southeast

If you’re willing to go as far as the Seacoast, (it’s only an hour, y’all) and I think by September you should be, there’s real music happening there too.

Shaggy plays Bernie’s Beach Bar in Hampton Beach on Thursday, August 27th at 8 PM, part of a Hot Radio Maine beach bash that will be exactly as unserious and fun as it sounds. Graham Nash, of The Hollies and Crosby, Stills & Nash, plays Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club in downtown Portsmouth on Tuesday, September 15th at 7:30, a career-spanning set in a room that used to be a 1905 YMCA and now has some of the best acoustics on this coast.

Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom closes out the season with Lee Brice on Sunday, September 20th at 8 PM, and Terry Fator, the ventriloquist and singer, on Sunday the 27th at 7. Both are the kind of show where you make a night of it, dinner on the water first, music after.

Up in the White Mountains

If you’re willing to go west and up, the White Mountains have their own claim on this stretch of summer.

The White Mountain Boogie N’ Blues Festival takes over Sugar Shack Campground in North Thornton August 14th through 16th, its 29th year running. This is not a small local thing. It’s a past national award winner for best blues festival in the country, and this year’s lineup includes Grammy winner Ruthie Foster, Southern Avenue, and Albert Cummings, plus a full weekend of camping, vendors, and a kids’ area if you’re bringing the family. If you go, go for the whole weekend. It’s built for that.

And if bagpipes count as music to your ear the way they do to mine, the NH Highland Games take over Loon Mountain in Lincoln September 18th through 20th, with massed pipe bands, Celtic and folk performers, and enough happening that you could lose an entire weekend up there without trying. Buy a kilt, or a shawl, and pretend you’re starring in the latest season of Outlander.

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The Part Where I Say the Obvious Thing

There’s about six weeks left of outdoor music in this region before the tents come down and the bandstands go quiet until next June. I don’t think that’s a reason to be sad about it. I think it’s the reason to actually go.

And during that period, and throughout the winter, there is music to be found indoors and in unexpected corners all year round. One of my favorite “stop in when I’m driving by” venues is a small church in Tuftonboro that does a country music jam every Tuesday evening all year round. I take a thermos of something that may or may not be tea and settle into a pew and appreciate the talent. My neighbors do a bonfire every October that rivals any backyard jam session I attended growing up. And most of the restaurants who stay open year round bring in music at least once a week all winter.

If you’re new here, or thinking about being here, this is as good an introduction to the place as any real estate listing I could send you. This is what people are doing on a Tuesday in September, or a Saturday in August. They’re not indoors.

Here’s to finding the song that speaks to you.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Psst…where are your favorite small venues in the region? DM me or comment below!

Before the Farmhouses

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:40:14 GMT

I don’t have Abenaki ancestry, and I’m not an historian. This isn’t my story to tell from the inside, and I want to be be totally transparent about that. What I can offer is some observations, imperfect at best, pulled from what’s documented. I did a deep dive into available sources, read carefully and have attempted to base the argument I want to make on analysis of those expert sources. I didn’t want to simply share a set of facts.

Here’s the argument, which isn’t a particularly controversial one. Long before any farmhouse in this region existed, long before deeds or property lines or we had a concept of “resort”, seasonal rhythm wasn’t a preference here. It was just how life was. Spring meant the fish, or it meant a much harder year. Fall meant getting a set of hard calculations right, or paying for it in January. That fact isn’t some distant, unrelated past. It’s still the truest thing about living in this region, whether or not most of us here now would ever put it in those terms. Maybe we don’t dry fish to eat through the winter, but we rely on tourist dollars earned in summer to fund programs we need in the winter.

I make my living helping people decide where and how to live in this region. That’s not a small thing to be responsible for, and I don’t think I’m doing it all that well or with integrity without understanding what this land actually demanded of the people who lived here first, on the land’s terms, not chosen as a summer retreat, but stewarded as a relationship based on mutual respect, and not a little awe.

That’s not nostalgia. It’s not a lifestyle I’m holding up as an ideal, per se. Personally, I really like being able to eat strawberries in my winter oatmeal. I do, however, think what came before deserves to be understood because it still shapes how we live here today, and everything that came in between.

Spring

The year turned on the fish, and nothing else really moved until that turn happened.

Every spring, at falls and rapids throughout the region, families gathered for the fish runs. Shad, salmon, alewife, moving upstream to spawn in numbers that are hard to picture now. People built weirs, fence-like traps made of stone or wood, to funnel fish into shallow water where they could be caught by hand or with spears from a canoe. Amoskeag Falls, on the Merrimack near what’s now Manchester, was one of the largest gathering points in the region, drawing people from well beyond the Lakes Region for fishing, trade, and the wider social fabric that a shared, reliable food source made possible.

Closer to home, the Weirs, that stretch of shoreline every summer visitor to Winnipesaukee already knows by name, gets that name honestly. It was a fishing site first. The structure built there to catch fish gave the place its English name centuries later, whether the people using it today know that or not. This region is peppered with words we use casually around here, Winnipesaukee, Ossipee, Merrimack, Chocorua, Pequawket, Monadnock, that aren’t affectation. They’re remnants of a language that once rang out across the lake and in the woods where we now hike for recreation.

Spring also meant travel. River travel was done in light, flexible birch bark canoes, easy to carry overland when the water ran out. Building one took weeks of skilled, exacting work. This wasn’t casual, like the way I throw a canoe I bought online onto my car and head out on a whim.

Summer

By early summer, families had settled into villages, always close to water, for drinking, for travel, for the fish that mattered as much as anything grown in a garden. Wigwams went up in a half circle, close enough that the work of the season could be shared rather than carried alone.

This was planting season too. Women and children tended plots of corn, beans, and squash, grown together in a method that fed the soil instead of stripping it, a detail that still strikes me given how much of this region’s more recent agricultural history involved land being farmed or timber harvested until it gave out. When you see a field covered in invasive bittersweet, thats a field that could have been better stewarded. For open water, families used heavy dugout canoes, carved from white pine, built for the lake itself rather than the rivers feeding it. The band associated with Winnipesaukee carried that lake’s name for a reason. So did the Ossipee band, further east. These weren’t separate nations so much as extended family groups, each with a defined territory for hunting, fishing, and small scale farming, moving within it deliberately as the year turned.

Fall

If spring was about the fish, fall was about everything else, and it asked more of people than any other season did.

Fish caught in spring and summer had already been smoked and dried for months of storage. Crops were harvested and sorted, some kept fresh as long as possible, the rest packed into underground storage pits dug and lined with care, a technique this region’s Abenaki had that their northern relatives, working a shorter growing season, didn’t have the luxury of using. This wasn’t a single afternoon of canning the blueberries you gathered on an outing, like I play at each summer. It was weeks of continuous, exacting labor, and it required real expertise. What to keep. What to let go. Get that math wrong and the consequence wasn’t inconvenience. It was a hard winter made harder, privation, and hunger.

There’s a version of this I could tell you that sounds peaceful, all golden light and baskets of corn. That would rhyme nicely with the beautiful tones of fall leaves and the maple syrup and apple picking we all enjoy now. I don’t think that’s honest. Fall here was a hard, high stakes negotiation with a season that was about to turn dangerous, and everyone involved knew exactly what was riding on getting it right.

Winter

Winter was spent settled rather than constantly on the move, and that settled time became its own kind of essential labor. Trapping continued through the cold months, particularly beaver, valuable for both fur and food. Tools were made and repaired. Skins were tanned. And I’d guess, though this is closer to inference than documented fact, that winter was when knowledge moved between generations most deliberately. My imagination tells me that winter fires was when there was finally time for someone older to teach someone younger the essential medicine and meaning making that couldn’t be taught in the middle of a fish run.

None of that made winter gentle. New Hampshire winters were not, and are not, for the faint of heart. Even now, keeping an eye on your oil tank can mean the difference between riding out a storm in comfort and begging Eastern Oil to make an emergency delivery mid-tempest. A community that had judged the fall correctly could settle in. One that hadn’t faced real threats to survival. I don’t want to soften that. It wasn’t a season people found charming. It was a season people respected, exactly the way you respect something that could genuinely hurt you, and they built an entire year’s worth of labor around making sure it didn’t.

What broke this

I’m not going to pretend this story moves smoothly from an established, thriving culture into the present day. By the early 1600s, European ships were fishing off the coast, and exploring the land for plunder and settlement and with them came disease the Abenaki had no immunity to. Smallpox and influenza tore through populations between roughly 1615 and 1620, before most English settlement had even begun in earnest. It wasn’t raiding parties and war that decimated the indigenous communities of this area, not yet. It was disease.

The man who led the Pennacook through what came after was named Passaconaway, and his seat of power was Amoskeag Falls, the same falls where families had gathered every spring for generations to fish. He chose diplomacy. For decades, while conflict flared elsewhere in the region, Passaconaway held peace with the English, negotiating and absorbing setback after setback rather than going to war. In 1642, English soldiers went looking for him on a false rumor of an uprising. They didn’t find him, but they found his son, Wonalancet, and held him for roughly two years before releasing him. Passaconaway kept the peace anyway.

It didn’t save the land. By the 1660s, English settlement had pushed so far into Pennacook territory that Passaconaway, the man who had once ruled all of it, had to formally petition the colonial government for a small plot to live on. Decades of careful diplomacy and realism had bought his people time. It never bought them back their land, or the kin lost to european diseases, and it was never going to.

Then came further war, competing claims on land that had never been understood as ownable in the first place, and a slow, brutal displacement. Many families moved north into what’s now Quebec, to communities like Odanak, where their descendants live today. By the end of the century, the population of this region looked nothing like it had a hundred years before. That is the direct, traceable reason the landscape I sell houses in today looks the way it does, and I don’t think that fact should sit quietly in a footnote.

Where this gets complicated

The story of Abenaki identity in New Hampshire today is not settled, and I want to be careful with it rather than tidy about it. New Hampshire is the only state in New England with no state or federally recognized tribe. Several groups here identify as Abenaki, but the two federally recognized Abenaki First Nations, Odanak and Wôlinak, both in Quebec, have said publicly and repeatedly that most of these New Hampshire groups have no demonstrated ancestral connection to Abenaki communities. It’s an active, unresolved dispute, with real people and real stakes on every side of it.

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What I think we still owe this history

There’s no clean line from what I’ve just described to where we are now. Colonization broke that continuity in cruel and tragic ways. But there are some important throughlines. There are still tensions here between who is of this region and who is just visiting. This region still runs on its seasons. It still punishes people who forget that, whether you’re two hundred years removed from a storage pit or two winters into your life here.

There’s a smaller, second thought sitting alongside that one. I’ve written before about what it means to be a steward of an old house, caring for something you didn’t build and won’t be around to see the end of. Looking honestly at what I’ve just described, I notice this region’s relationship with its land and water has swung between real care and real damage more than once in the centuries since, the clearing, the overfishing, the water quality fights, land pushed past what it could give. I’m not claiming any lineage to the people who lived here first or even real knowledge about what their lives were like. I simply can’t. I’m only saying the mistakes this region keeps having to relearn aren’t new mistakes, and that seems worth sitting with too.

I live in a house that’s two hundred and fifty seven years old, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t really curious about what this land was like when the house first went up. That felt like a gap worth closing, not because the past is quaint, but because I think the seasons this region runs on are still trying to tell us something, if we’re willing to actually listen instead of just admiring the view.

Here’s to seeking to understand what came before.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

August is here

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:47:28 GMT

August here means living in two seasons at once. The one you’re in and the one you’re already anticipating because it’s even better.

The other night I was sitting on the back steps watching the dogs patrol the yard for challenges to their fiefdom, and I noticed the fireflies. Not a few. Dozens, blinking on and off over grass I haven’t mowed in a month because the lawnmower is broken and the guy who fixes them is booked out past Labor Day and the guy who cuts my neighbors grass is too busy to even return phone calls in August. My neighbors have opinions about my yard right now, I’m sure. But the fireflies don’t care that the grass is a disaster. They love it. And it’s a bargain I’m totally willing to strike, even it means I’m up here trying to sell houses while my own looks a little abandoned.

Down south, where I grew up, we called fireflys lightning bugs. As kids we’d catch them in mason jars and pinch off their glowing butts to wear them as rings and necklaces while we ran around in the dark. Now, I recognize this as a fairly macabre thing to do to a lovely insect, but anyone who has read Flannery O’Connor knows Southerners have a grim streak and none of the adults ever said a word. These beautiful bugs have gotten rare in a lot of places, especially the kind of paved-in city neighborhood I grew up in. Up here, it turns out, all you have to do is neglect your lawn for four weeks and they show up in droves. I told my 3 year old niece they’re fairies giving out wishes, and I’m happy she’ll carry that memory into adulthood instead of my own of wanton murder and grotesque jewlery.

That’s August for me. Equal parts abundance and permission to let something go. The nostalgia of summer memories and the anticipation of future happiness. The warmth of midday and the barest hint of fall in the air at dawn.

Here in the Lakes Region, August doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like the fullest version of what came before it. The water is finally warm enough to get into without steeling yourself first. The days are still long enough that a 6 p.m. swim feels ordinary instead of stolen. The bear cubs are out on their own now, peeking around trees in the woods like they’re not sure yet if the world is dangerous or fascinating. My rooster, the first one I’ve ever kept, is testing out his crow, not quite committed to the bit but trying it on for size. Apples are starting to show on my trees, green and hard and still two months from anything you’d want to eat. Everything is exactly as much as it can be in this moment and not a thing more.

And also. In the Walgreens in Wolfeboro last week there was a cart of Halloween candy and decor sitting by the pharmacy, waiting to be assigned an aisle. Not stocked yet. Just staged. Waiting. And even though I love fall, and Samhain most of all, I’m not quite ready y’all.

That’s the part people who only visit in summer don’t usually feel, the way the ending arrives inside the peak instead of after it. On Facebook the boat people have started leaving comments like “IYKYK, the best boating is still to come,” which sounds like a brilliant piece of social marketing by Goodhue, but is really a secret handshake among locals that the countdown is on. In the coffee shops the staff who start to prepare your order while you’re still six deep in the line give you a look that means the same thing. Only a few more weeks. Not said out loud. Just a knowing glance that communciates that it will soon be locals season again.

I used to think loving a place meant wanting the good part to last forever. Living here year round has taught me something different. They’re all good parts. I love August wholeheartedly. And, I’m looking forward to what comes next. I’m in the moment, but I’m also gleeful about the future. It’s not some tidy metaphor about impermanence you might read on a bottle of kombucha. Its just the plain fact that I can be sitting in traffic on Main Street, listening to the melange of music mingling from 7 cars and motorcycles, sunburned and completely happy, while some other part of me is already standing in a crisp driveway drinking in woodsmoke and contentment. I’m not choosing between the hammock in the ruins of the old barn and the sweater weather that’s coming. I want both, each in their moment, equally, which shouldn’t be possible and somehow just is.

A client of mine, relocating from New Mexico, stood in a yard with me this week and just said, “everything is so green.” She meant it as a compliment, I think, but it also sounded a little like awe at an alien landscape. And I remember thinking she was seeing the top layer of something that takes longer to actually feel. The green is real. So is the version of this place that shows up in November with the leaves gone and the tourists gone and the lake gone quiet and mean-looking under a flat sky. You don’t get to keep one without eventually meeting the other. I think that’s most of what people are actually asking me when they ask what it’s really like to live here. And most of us who choose this place, love them both equally. The verdant abundance and the stark beauty.

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So sure, I want more summer. I want more naps in that hammock, more evenings on the water after the day-trippers clear out, more sitting in traffic looking for parking on Main Street. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also looking forward to what’s next. The mornings that finally beg for a sweater. The kids back in school, which I will not pretend to be sad about. Woodsmoke instead of bugspray. I moved here because I love winter too, the kind of cold that burns a little on the way in. That’s still months off, but it doesn’t mean I can’t eagerly await it while still enjoying the warmth of the sun on my shoulders when I come up for air in Lake Wentworth.

For now it’s August. The bugs are out, the grass is a mess, and I’m right here. I’m also already a little bit in October, and if I’m honest, that’s the part I like best about living here instead of just visiting it. Not one season ending so another can start. Both of them, at once, taking up the same amount of room in your imagination.

Here’s to loving what is and whats to come just as much.

Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

What’s Happening in the Lakes Region This August

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:37:07 GMT

In 1899, about 130 years after the first settlers started building homes (including mine thanks to Captain Jonathan Gilman) in the Lakes Region, a New Hampshire governor named Frank Rollins had a problem. Towns that used to hold two thousand people were down to a few hundred. Farmhouses were going to ruin. The forests that had been cleared for pasture were growing back wild, because the people who’d worked that land had left for factory jobs in the cities or farmland out west, and they weren’t coming back. Not to visit, not often enough, and certainly not to stay.

So Rollins invented something. He called it Old Home Day, and the idea was simple: once a year, invite everyone who used to live here to come back, just for a day. Not to move home. Not to buy back the farm. Just to show up, eat something at a long table, and remember that leaving a place doesn’t mean it stops being yours.

That was 127 years ago, and we still do it across the region and state. This August, something like two dozen towns across this part of New Hampshire will hold their Old Home Day, not to be confused with Town Pride days (which I totally thought meant something very different when I first moved here than it actually does). Somebody’s daughter flies in from Denver. Somebody’s college roommate makes the drive from Boston because her grandmother used to run the bean supper. Nobody’s asking if you still have residency in the state. You just have to still care about this place or someone who now, once, or might someday live here.

Tourists are welcome too, but really this one is for the people who have some long-standing connection to the area. The people who leave and the people who stay both think they’re the ones who got it right. Old Home Day just quietly refuses to pick a side and reminds us that this place means lots of different things to lots of different people. Sometimes it means nostalgia and sometimes it means you’ve arrived exactly where you want to be for the next season or chapter of life.

Here’s what’s happening, starting with the days built for exactly that.

Old Home Days

Activities vary, but often include food trucks, bean suppers, barbecues. There might be antique cars, craft shows, a book sale, a town-wide yard sale, displays from the local historical society. Live music, plays, and sing-a-longs have also been known to happen. As you’ll see below, details vary…but for Old Town Day, IYKYK.

Alton Old Home Day, Saturday, August 8 is the highlight but like Sandwich, there are activities for a full week.

Belmont Old Home Day, Saturday, August 8.

New Hampton Old Home Day, Saturday, August 8, 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., with square dancing from 7 to 10 p.m.

Sandwich Old Home Week, Sunday, August 2 through Sunday, August 9. A full week rather than a single day, which tells you something about how seriously Sandwich takes this.

Gilmanton Old Home Day, Saturday, August 15, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Bean-hole beans, an art show, thirty-some vendors, and this year an Abenaki storyteller added to the lineup. Free, no dogs.

Celebrating 250 Years: Discovering Your Milton Roots, New Hampshire Farm Museum, Milton. Saturday, August 15, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This is Milton’s first-ever Old Home Day, timed to the town’s 250th anniversary, hosted at a working farm museum on 50 acres that’s been there since the late 1700s. There’s something particularly good about a town starting this tradition now rather than a century ago.

Gilford Old Home Day, Saturday, August 29.

Bristol Old Home Day, Kelley Park. Saturday, August 29, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Classic car show, food trucks, all-day live music, and if you plan your whole day around it, the TTCC lobster and chicken supper caps things off that evening.

Craft & Maker Season

League of NH Craftsmen’s 93rd Annual Craftsmen’s Fair, Mount Sunapee Resort, Newbury. August 1-9, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. Technically Sunapee country, not ours, but it’s the oldest continuously running craft fair in the country and an easy drive for most of the Lakes Region.

On the Green 2 Arts & Crafts Festival, Brewster Academy, Wolfeboro. August 7-9.

46th Annual Lakes Region Fine Arts & Crafts Festival, downtown Meredith and the Mill Falls Marketplace. August 22-23. Running since 1979, and still the one locals actually go to themselves.

Rumney Village Art Walk, town common and around the village. August 16, noon to 4 p.m. A juried fine arts and crafts fair spread through an actual working village rather than a fairground, which changes the feel of it entirely.

Not in the lakes region, but if you want to take a drive down to the Seacoast, Jenn will have a booth this year for Lakes and Peaks Provisions Co. at the Hampton Live Freely Fest on Sunday August 23rd. Stop by, say hello, and sample some NH made crafts and goods.

Music, Most Nights of the Week

Wolfeboro’s Cate Park bandstand runs its Saturday series through August: High Range (bluegrass) opens August 1, Compaq Big Band plays the 8th, Ball in the House (a cappella) the 15th, Jimmy and the Jesters (50s and 60s rock) the 22nd, and the Eric Grant Band closes it out the 29th. Free, 7 to 9 p.m.

Alton Bay runs its own Saturday bandstand series all month too: Quint E. Sential Band on the 1st, Bittersweet on the 8th, Mutha Hubbard Band on the 15th, Saxx Roxx on the 22nd, and Cool Beans closing out the 29th. Same free, same lawn-chair energy, quieter crowd.

Bristol’s summer concert series at Kelley Park continues with North River Music on August 6 and Club Soda on August 20, Thursday evenings.

Downtown Laconia’s Concerts on Canal runs August 14 (Cozy Throne) and August 26 (Chris White Bandine), 5 to 9 p.m. on Canal Street, rain or shine.

Over in Moultonborough, Castle in the Clouds runs Music Nights on the Carriage House terrace most weeknights this month, dinner and live music with the sun going down over Winnipesaukee. Reservations sell out fast; check their calendar for exact dates.

Tuftonboro’s 19 Mile Beach has free outdoor concerts most Thursdays, including Skyroad on August 6, Idol Hands on August 13, and Carolyn Ramsay Band on August 20.

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Theatre & Stage

Shrek the Musical, The Colonial Theatre, Laconia. August 7-9. Powerhouse Theatre Collaborative’s big multigenerational summer production, with donations collected for the Lakes Region Children’s Auction.

The 39 Steps, Winnipesaukee Playhouse, Meredith. August 14-23. Four actors playing over 150 characters in a spoof of Hitchcock’s spy thriller, including an onstage plane crash.

Annie, Interlakes Theatre, Meredith. August 13-16. If Shrek doesn’t scratch the family-musical itch, this will.

Juston McKinney: Parentally Challenged, The Colonial Theatre, Laconia. August 15, 7:30 p.m. New Hampshire’s own, if you haven’t caught his act yet.

On the Water

Loon Cruise, Squam Lakes Natural Science Center, Holderness. Mondays and Fridays at 3 p.m. through late August. A Loon Preservation Committee biologist joins the ride, route changes weekly. Advance reservations required.

The Millie B, Wolfeboro Town Docks. A 60-minute narrated tour on a replica 1928 Hacker-Craft around the southern end of Winnipesaukee, past a loon preservation area, with the kind of history you only get from someone who’s told it a thousand times.

Sasquatch Footy Regatta, Bridge Falls Path, Wolfeboro. August 15, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Back Bay Skippers hosts this, by way of the NH Boat Museum, and yes, it is exactly what it sounds like: foot long model yachts that are raced across the Back Bay in Wolfeboro. Genuinely one of the more delightful things on this list.

JustGoXplore Overlanding Expo, Gunstock Mountain Resort, Gilford. August 14-15, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. New England’s only overlanding and camping expo, free to attend, with a Rig Show on the 15th.

Lectures & Local History

The Wright Museum in Wolfeboro runs its Tuesday lecture series all month, and hosts its Cruise In to the Wright car show on August 15.

The Lake Winnipesaukee Museum in Laconia has talks on the NH Bomb Squad (Aug 5) and the history of the Weirs (Aug 19).

Belknap Mill hosts the Central NH Writers’ Group on August 19.

Milton’s Old Town Hall hosts a talk on the history of Rochester, NH on August 16, part of the town’s own reckoning with 250 years of itself.

Farm & Nature

Guided Paddles at the Newfound Center, Hebron. Sundays 10 a.m. to noon and Mondays 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., August 2 through 17.

Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, Pemi Oxbow Preserve, Holderness. Weekly Mondays through August 31, 9 to 10:30 a.m.

Squam Lakes Natural Science Center has a bioblitz walk series on August 4 and 6, and an Animal Birthday Bash on August 12.

Grey Rocks Conservation Center, Hebron, runs Kids Nature Exploration on August 6, 13, and 20, and a Discovery Walk with a naturalist on August 3, 10, and 17.

Anytime in August

If you don’t want to plan around a single date, the Lakes Region doesn’t really need you to. The lake is at its warmest right now, which means early morning is still the best time to be on it before the boat traffic picks up. The trails that felt like mud in May are dry and dusty now.

And if you find yourself at one of these Old Home Days this month, even a town that isn’t yours, even one you’re just passing through, stay for the bean supper and talk to your neighbors. That’s the whole point of the thing.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

The Third Chapter

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:44:42 GMT

There is a patio not far from my house where, most days between June and September, at four o’clock exactly, my lovely clients and friends are pouring a gin and tonic or a pomegranate martini. I know this because I have driven past it enough times to set a watch by it. I join when I’m able, and I give a little honk when I drive by but can’t stop. The couple who owns the patio are semi-retired and my morning commute often sees them updating the landscaping or supervising a contractor as they renovate the small house near my favorite swimming hole. They’ll head back to a warmer Southern state in the late fall…maybe. For now their calendar has exactly one fixed appointment a day, and it is cocktails at 4 pm.

I used to think that was what retirement looks like, wherever you are, but certainly up here. The reward lap. Projects you do for love not for money. Water, a cocktail shaker, maybe a boat that costs more than many people’s first house. A return to the way some classes lived in bygone times, resting and pursuing genteel habits like embroidery and golf. And, sure, there might also be some passion projects or a consulting gig here and there, but mostly, your time is your own.

What I’ve learned from living here for several years now is that this is a story. It is not the story. The stories that comprise even my small circle of friends and acquaintance are much more varied.

Last fall at a dinner party, I met a woman who hasn’t pulled a paycheck in a decade. But she spends three afternoons a week in a courtroom with attorneys and judges and social workers, advocating for a kid who isn’t hers, because she is a CASA volunteer and she decided, somewhere around seventy-two, that she had spent enough of her working life being useful to a company and wanted the next bit to be useful to a small person that might not have anyone else in their corner. Nobody pours her a drink at four. She is usually still in her car or gathering information from pediatricians and teachers or hanging out with a child at a park or getting ice cream just because they can.

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Then there is my neighbor, who in his 90s has seen changes to this region I can only guess at. We eat a meal together about once every six weeks or so and in the spring, I was allowed to join his gentleman’s breakfast club at Linos as a one-time special guest. Around the table was an amateur historian and local geneologist, a volunteer docent at Wolfeboro’s WWII museum, a gentelman who hand built the “cabin” on Lovell that his great grandkids now enjoy during the summer months, and the organizer of the annual Chooch festival which brings model train enthusiasts to nearby Union, NH from as far as Pennsylvania and New York.

There is a newcomers club, and there is a writers center that one friend is building out of a a website, meeting rooms at the library and sheer dedication. Both exist because someone decided, well into their retirement, that not knowing anyone yet wasn’t a permanent condition. I could write a whole piece about either one. I probably will.

Some of my friends are only half here. They keep the house through the summer and close it up in October, and by November they are in South Carolina, or Florida, or somewhere in Texas near a grandchild, and by May or June they are back, and the lake tells them when its time to open up each year. This isn’t retreat. It’s a second geography, built on purpose, and most of them will tell you the Lakes Region summer is the whole reason the other five months are bearable.

Other friends stayed for the grandkids and built their whole third chapter around a school pickup schedule. Their calendars are fuller now than when they worked. They are there for every dance recital or travel soccer game. They sew gymnastics leotards and bandage ice hockey injuries. They give the kids ice cream for dinner every so often and remind their parents that this too shall pass, whatever the crisis of the moment is. There is a particular kind of tired that comes from being genuinely needed by an eight-year-old, and most of them would not trade it for cocktails every day at 4…at least most of the time.

And then there are the friends for whom none of this is a choice in the way it sounds like a choice. They are on a fixed income in a place where the taxes went up again this year. They know the veterans’ tax credit paperwork by heart because they’ve filed it every year since they qualified. They know which town employee processes fuel assistance fastest and which one takes until December. Meals on Wheels comes on Tuesdays. They are not the sad ending to somebody else’s story about boats and cocktail hour. They are the same people, the same generation, sometimes the same street, navigating a version of this place that asks something different of them.

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That is the part I want to be honest about, because it would be easier to just tell the story about boats and cocktails and faces stretched to the sun. Retirement here is not one thing dressed up in six different outfits. It is genuinely different lives, running in parallel, sometimes overlapping at the transfer station or the church supper or the museum gift shop, where the man who runs the tours might ring up the sale for the woman waiting on her fuel assistance approval, and neither of them thinks anything of it, because that is just how life is in a community that means many different things to many different people.

I don’t think the Lakes Region hands anyone a third chapter. I think it gives you the raw materials, a lake, a season, a small enough population that showing up matters, and then it is entirely up to you, or your circumstances, what you build with them. Some people build a boat life. Some people build a courtroom advocacy practice out of thin air at sixty-five. Some people build a way to get through February on eleven hundred dollars a month with their dignity intact, which might be the hardest retirement project of all.

If you’re thinking through what your own next chapter might look like here, whichever direction that’s leaning, I’m always happy to talk. Even if you’re just thinking out loud.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

This is part of an ongoing series about what the third chapter of life actually looks like in the Lakes Region, for the people who chose it.

How I Actually Market a Property

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:00:53 GMT

One of the things about buying and selling real estate is that a lot of the process is repeated across transactions. Listing. Offers. Inspections. Closings. But some parts deserve a lot more intentionality than they sometimes get. Take selling a house. There’s an approach that is pretty typical. A photographer with a drone comes out on a Tuesday. The listing that talks about the “blend of modern updates and timeless character” or “clean lines and ample space to spread out” goes live Thursday. You hodl an open house Sunday, two to four. Maybe there’s wine or coffee and cookies. The, the wait for an offer begins. Do another open house every weekend until you get one. If no offers come in for a month, talk to the seller about dropping the price. Repeat the same four steps for the next house, and the one after that.

It’s not wrong, exactly. It just treats the house like a product that is interchangeable with a lot of other products, not a place, or a lifestyle, that can be felt — and I think that gap is where a lot of good properties get sold short.

As always, I want to be transparent with you. In my second year of real estate practice, I mostly work with buyers, and I love it. I bought my own home in my mid-forties — later than most, if only by a few years according to the most recent NAR data. And here’s what I learned while house hunting for myself: every house and every seller has a story they could tell about that house. When I visited a cape in Warner, the listing agent talked about the appliances, the new tile job, the storage in the basement. But what made me think about putting in an offer was a story I built in my head about having coffee at a little table in the back yard listening to the birds and how I would make the pub down the street my go-to hang out when I wanted a drink and some conversation with other adults. How I could have the serenity of the woods, but be at my nieces for bubbles in the backyard and storytime before bed in under an hour. Did the details matter? Of course they did, but what sells a house, in my opinion is a story.

So, I thought I would share how I market properties to buyers. Not just when they’re my own listing, though definitely then. If you follow Keys to the Lakes on facebook (and if you don’t, come find me!), you’ll probably have noticed that I’ve started sharing select properties there that aren’t my listings. I always get permission from the listing agent to do so and credit them in the post (because: transparency and community over competition please). Its often a house I’ve popped into during an Open House, or I’ve shown to a client who has decided its not quite right for them. But the house, like many houses, spoke to me; it whispered that it had a hundred different stories to tell. So, when that happens, I pick the one that leaps into my imagnation and share it.

Here’s my general approach to marketing a house, whether you’re listing with me or you’re an agent who has given me permission to boost your listing with potential buyers on the hunt.

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Recently, I met with a couple who spends a few months a year, spread across summer and fall, living in a cottage in the woods about 15 minutes from Lake Winnipeesaukee. They’re thinking about selling. Not because they have to. Because it’s time, in the way these things become time, slowly and then all at once. And when we talked about what mattered to them beyond the number, they didn’t lead with square footage or the roof’s age. They led with the way afternoon light comes through the trees and lands on the porch around four. They told me about guests who’ve stayed there over the years, people who arrived wound tight from wherever they’d come from and left three days later looser, slower, quieter in a good way. That’s not a detail for them. That’s the whole point of the place. Somewhat sheepishly, as though I wouldn’t take them seriously, they told me that the land the house is on just carries some energy that is welcoming and calming. I didn’t scoff, I nodded knowingly. I could feel it too.

If I were to market that cottage like an investment property, I would have failed them before even starting. If I were to lean into short-term rental potential because the numbers would support it, I would have told a true story that isn’t their story. Their cottage could make someone money. That was never the question they were asking me to answer. And, they’re still thinking about whether they’re ready to let this one go, which is absolutely fine.

Once you start thinking about marketing as storytelling, it starts with figuring out which story is not only true, but also resonant. Not the story that sells fastest, unless that’s the sellers express need. The one that’s going to speak to someone out there looking for just the thing that the seller also loves about the home. For the cottage, that would have meant photography and video built around stillness and light, not staged perfection. It would have meant a virtual open house so a family in Connecticut who can’t get up here on a random Wednesday can still feel what the porch feels like at four o’clock and ask questions about what’s in that cabinet as though they were beside you.

For properties where a physical open house makes sense, I’ll host one and I’ll give it my all. But an open house is one tool, not the whole toolbox, and I’m not going to hand a seller a single tool and call it a strategy. A strategy might mean assisted showings when a property benefits from someone walking a buyer through the parts that don’t photograph. The particular quiet of a place. The sound the dock makes. Things a listing sheet can’t hold. It always means social media that treats the property as a place, not a product. The difference matters more than you might think, and is rare enough that when I talk about it this way people sometimes raise their eyebrows.

And it means pricing as a conversation, not a formula I base on comparable properities and interest rates. I’ll totally look at those and bring a range of what I think the market will support in this moment. But comps alone can’t tell you what this specific property, with this specific light and this specific history, is worth to the right buyer. I’ll bring the data. I’ll also bring judgment, and I’ll expect you to push back on both.

None of this means I can guarantee who ends up owning the cottage, or what they’ll do with it once the sale closes. I can’t promise the next owner will feel what my sellers feel when they’re sitting on that porch. Nobody can promise that. What I can do is market the property so it reaches the kind of person who’s looking for exactly what it offers, instead of burying that in generic language built for a buyer who wants something else entirely. I can tell the true story carefully enough that someone recognizes it. What they build from there is theirs.

That’s the job, as I see it. Not put it up and wait. Understand what’s actually being sold, tell that story with everything available to me, and trust that honesty reaches the person who’s meant to find it.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

The M/S Mount Washington

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:46:10 GMT

Okay, I have a confession to make. I don’t own a boat. I can’t drive a boat. I kayak and I canoe (theoretically…if someone else has one and offers), but despite living in major port cities much of my adult life, I’ve never really gotten into boating. So this piece is for others who like me, want to know what it’s actually like to spend a day on the water without owning a boat.

There’s a horn.

You hear it before you see her, most days. Deep and long, the kind of sound that used to mean something specific to river towns and ports of call and doesn’t mean much of anything anymore except on this lake, where it still means the same thing it meant in 1940. The Mount is coming through. Get out of the way or wave.

From the shore, its fun to watch how people react to it. In Wolfeboro, even lifelong residents stop what they’re doing and glance to the lake. Sometimes you’ll see people scurrying because they came over from Laconia on the morning run and have been shopping and eating for the last two hours and need to make sure they can get back to where their car was left. As one of the Mount Captains likes to jest, if you miss the Mount, its a long swim back to Weirs.

The M/S Mount Washington is 230 feet of white hull and three decks, and local knowledge and opinions about what exactly it is vary widely. For some, it’s a tourist trap, something for the airbnb-ers or leaf peepers to do. For some, its a family tradition. Some think of it as another neighborhood hangout; I met a distinguished older gentleman once who told me its where he takes his dates which made me chuckle…and sort of wince. What if it’s awful and you’re stuck in the middle of the lake with this person! For others it’s a piece of history; older than the Titanic, there is a certain air of a bygone era aboard. Really, it’s all of those things. That’s sort of the point. Not everyone needs one thing from the same experience, and the Mount doesn’t ask you to.

Here’s what I mean.

On a weekday, she runs three trips between Laconia and Wolfeboro, scenic daytime cruises with a narrated tour that will tell you which island belongs to which mostly-forgotten New Hampshire family, some of the Abenaki tales about the lake and how certain areas got their names, and at least one story you’re not sure you believe about a mink farm that lost its entire annual yield in a single Nor’Easter once upon a time. A few nights a week she becomes a dinner cruise, buffet lines and a bar and someone playing music you can dance to if you want, or just listen to from a deck chair with a drink in your hand, which is what most people actually do. Some nights she’s booked for something private entirely, a wedding or a corporate thing or somebody’s fortieth birthday, and you’ll see her lit up from the shore and wonder whose night that is.

Weekends bring the action. There’s a Sunday brunch that’s become its own tradition for people who’ve stopped needing an occasion. It’s all popped champagne corks and bloody mary’s and omelets made to order. There’s a princess tea party for the six-year-olds in tiaras, a Prohibition-era murder mystery for the adults who want to accuse a stranger of being a jewel thief over dessert, and a haunted cruise in October that leans harder into the ghost stories the narrated tour only hints at during daylight. I’ve witnessed the Princess Tea. I will say only that a room full of diminutive princesses drinking from china cups while their dad or grandfather sneaks away to get a gin and tonic is pretty cute.

If the Mount feels like too much boat, you have options. The Sophie C. still runs the mail, an honest-to-god floating post office delivering to islands that have no other way to get letters, and you can ride along and watch it happen. If you want something smaller and more yours, the Winnipesaukee Spirit is available to charter, an intimate version of the same water for a rehearsal dinner or a retirement send-off or twenty people who wanted the lake without the logistics. And, rumor has it there’s a returning vessel to the fleet. I’ve heard many a story from Wolfeboro area residents about the epic sunset cocktail cruises that the M/S Belle used to host. She’s been in repairs all season but the company keeps promising she’ll be sailing the lake again this season.

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And she’s inspired more than cruises. There’s Mount Washington merch in gift shops from Weirs Beach to Wolfeboro, at least a couple of local breweries have put her likeness or her name on a can, and I have personally watched a wedding photo shoot happen on her gangway, bridesmaids in taffeta trying not to slip on wet decking while a very patient photographer waited for the light. Politicians visit her for fundraisers and photo ops. Season ticket holders bring everyone who visits to take a ride.

But the part I actually love has nothing to do with any of that.

Most of the captains and crew live on this lake, on the shore or seasonally out on one of the islands, and it shows in how they run the boat. They hail people. A friend cooking out on a dock, another boat passing close, somebody they clearly haven’t seen since last September. They have a story for every cove and if you’re lucky enough to catch one of them walking around, they’ll point out sites of past boat accidents, where jet skis have no business going, and who exactly owns that mansion with the 5 separate wings and 3 boat houses. There’s a house on the Wolfeboro to Weirs run that fires off a mock cannon shot every single time the Mount goes by, and every single time, somebody on deck laughs like it’s the first time they’ve heard it.

I was aboard a few weeks ago, evening run, close to six o’clock. The light was doing that low gold thing it does out here in July. I looked over toward one of the islands and saw three kids sprinting down a dock, full speed, straight into the water. It’s the kind of shot you’ve seen a hundred times, on a postcard or in a beer commercial. This one wasn’t staged for anybody. It was just a Wednesday, and they were just doing what you do when you live somewhere like this. The water helps sound carry, so I was treated to one of them coming up giggling and another shouting, “No fair, you were supposed to wait for me.”

Almost every trip, somebody standing near me on deck squints at Governor’s Island and asks what one of those big places costs. I tell them the truth, which is that the newest ones are selling for somewhere near $15 million, and then I tell them the other truth, which is that there are still more modest homes out there if you’re willing to take on a generational camp that hasn’t been touched since 1954. You either update it, plumbing and wiring and all, or you learn to love it exactly as it is, a small preserved argument for how people used to spend a summer. Both are valid.

That’s the experience, really. A big white boat that’s somehow become shorthand for an entire way of being on this water, whether you’re a visitor who wants two and a half hours of lunch and scenery, or a local who’s lived here your whole life and still can’t resist waving back when she blows that horn. So don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t enjoy the big lake without a boat of your own. We all have the Mount.

If this made you think of someone who loves this lake, or someone who’s never been on it and should be, send it their way.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Lakes Region Growers, Farmers, and Producers

Keys to the Lakes — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:21:14 GMT

Recently I wrote about the restaurants worth driving to up here. This is the piece underneath that one. Because before any of those kitchens plate anything, someone grew it, raised it, or picked it. I wish I could say that means most restaurants up here are sourcing from the farmers and producers listed below. Some are. But I also see plenty of U.S. Foods trucks and Sodexo pulling into parking lots while I’m out and about. So if you care, ask.

Or do what I do, and gradually shift who’s filling your pantry. I have the blackest of black thumbs. Give me a succulent that requires only benign neglect and it will have gone on to that rock garden in the sky in no time. So instead I rely on friends, neighbors, and my local farmers.

There’s a reason this feels worth writing about right now. Cyclospora has been in the headlines this summer, with case numbers running well above a typical season, and one major outbreak traced to bagged lettuce served at a chain restaurant across five states. Up here, where you can get great seasonal produce and humanely raised, humanely butchered meat that you pick up in a cooler in the back of your truck, why wouldn’t you?

I say that without romance. Not every farm stand is a postcard. Some are a folding table under a tarp with a coffee can for cash and a sign that says trust is appreciated and enforced by a dog and a webcam we’re watching you on right now. The closeness is real, and it changes how you eat if you let it.

It also means something else. You have choices. So do the people growing your food. Getting to know a grower isn’t about finding the one correct way to farm, it’s about finding people whose choices line up with yours. Maybe that’s certified organic, maybe it’s just organic because that’s how their family has always done it, maybe you care about GMOs, or how animals are raised and processed, or none of that and you just want it to taste like something. None of those positions need defending, at least not to me. But you can’t line up your values with a farm’s if you’ve never asked the farm what its values are. A five minute conversation at a stand tells you more than any label will.

Which is also why a couple of very popular places locally didn’t make this list. I love a good banana. I have real feelings about a ripe mango. But if a Lakes Region farmstand is selling them at retail volume, I want to see the greenhouse that’s supposedly growing them at that scale, because otherwise that’s not local food, that’s a regular grocery run with better lighting.

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The Variety You’ll Find is Impressive

I’m going to start with Wakefield Marketplace, running Saturdays from Memorial Day through Columbus Day at the corner of Route 16 and Wakefield Road. It’s been going since 1995, which in market years makes it practically an elder. It’s the kind of market where you’ll run into three people you know before you’ve bought anything. If you’re trying to replace a full grocery run, you probably won’t find everything you need, there are more broadly stocked farmers markets. But if you want to pick up some lettuce, a dozen eggs, and a hat knit by a woman who cards and spins her own yarn or a handmade cutting board and the wood butter to keep it beautiful, this is your place. Find Cythina, the market coordinator and check out her unique and handmade art!

Picnic Rock Farms in Meredith runs fresh fruit and vegetables, a bakery, honey, cut flowers, and a CSA, and I still think about a cheese I bought there last summer. I was taste testing for Lakes and Peaks Provisions and these curds were the perfect blend of salty and creamy, with just a little bite. Now I buy them on my way to showings and eat them before I get home.

Beans & Greens in Gilford has changed shape a few times. It started as a produce farm, and in 2024 it shifted toward partnering with local growers and makers rather than growing everything itself, so what you’re getting now is more curated marketplace than single farm. The bakery, deli, and CSA (they call it Healthy Harvest) are still there, along with a biergarten that’s become its own destination. Worth knowing before you go in expecting the old version. And if you have kids, this place is worth a stop in the fall when they have a ton of traditional New England activities like pumpkin patches, bouncy houses, corn mazes, and more.

Surowiec Farm in Sanbornton has been in the same family since 1917, started as a dairy and poultry operation, and has been diversifying ever since. Apples, blueberries, cut flowers, meat, and a smoked cheese I keep hearing about from other people, if not yet myself. A hundred years of figuring out what actually grows here. That's something you can trust.

If You Want a Regular Commitment that Supports Your Local Food Ecosystem

If you want to actually commit to a farm for a season or more, this is where to look.

Pork Hill Farm in Ossipee is certified organic and grows vegetables, herbs, and cut flowers. They don’t raise pigs (I don’t think). It’s named for the road. Their CSA runs from June through January, including a joint winter share with three other regional farms. And, they do a breakfast spread with a view you won’t believe. Go give them a visit, its worth getting up early for.

Branch Hill Farm in Milton Mills offers naturally grown produce, hay, maple syrup, cider apples, and a CSA of its own. It’s a smaller operation, which tends to mean you know exactly whose hands touched what you’re eating. They also have a great youth internship program, helping inspire and train the next generation of gardeners and farmers, and they have a community run chicken cooperative that shares the labor and costs of an egg flock and divides the eggs amongst themselves.

Mountain Heartbeet in Tamworth is a woman-owned certified organic farm with an eighteen-week CSA and pick-your-own red raspberries in July. You’ll also find them at the Wolfeboro and Tamworth farmers markets if a full share feels like more than you need.

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For meat specifically, Top of the Hill Farm in Wolfeboro sells grass-fed beef by the piece, quarter, half, or whole. If you’ve never bought meat that way, it’s a different kind of commitment than a grocery store cooler, and most people who do it once don’t go back. Or if you just ask around, I bet your neighbors can tell you who is fattening a few pigs over the summer and might be willing to sell you a share for your freezer. Bartering is real, too, I recently traded a couple of meat chickens and 18 eggs for some venison. I don’t hunt, but I make a mean hunter’s stew and this fall, I’ll be grateful my neighbor knows what he’s doing so I can gross the kids out by making vension stew for dinner.

The Broader Local Ecosystem of Goods

Moose Mountain Farm in Brookfield is a small family dairy selling raw milk from Jersey and Guernsey cross cows, along with yogurt and butter. It’s the kind of place where the milk tastes like a different food than what comes in a carton. And, if you’re in the neighborhood, you might as well stop by Frost Heave Brewery where a couple turned their garage into a micro-brewery.

Main Street Maple in Belmont makes maple syrup and honey, with apiaries scattered around the Lakes Region. Good gift territory, and a good excuse to visit a sugarhouse if you never have.

The Empty Nest Blueberries & More in Brookfield is a small pick-your-own operation, the kind of afternoon that costs almost nothing and takes longer than you plan for, which is exactly the point.

My neigbor Caitlin and I have been raising and selling our own chickens for meat this year, which has taught me more about patience, the true cost of producing high quality local food humanely, and logistics than I expected. Our next batch will be ready in September or so, so message me if you want to reserve a few. I also usually have eggs on hand, and so do most of my neighbors. If you’re driving through and see a cooler with a sign and a cash box, that’s the whole system. Take what you’re paying for and don’t be one of the tourists whose faces end up on the town facebook page as someone who “forgot” to leave money.

The Olde Ways at Mustard Seed Farm in Tuftonboro hand makes herbal salves, creams, and teas on a working farm, and has been building out classes alongside a small farm store. If you want to learn something instead of just buying something, this is where I’d point you.

Tiny Hill Farm in Milton Mills raises Nigerian dwarf dairy goats, plus a flock of rainbow egg-laying chickens, and runs goat classes if you want to learn the animal before you commit to the milk. Goat's milk products aren't for everyone, but if you've never had fresh goat cheese from a farm five minutes from your own, it's worth the detour to find out which camp you're in.

Pride & Breadjudice bakes artisan sourdough out of Ossipee, small batch, organic when they can manage it. If you've been buying sandwich bread at the grocery store out of habit rather than choice, this is the easiest way to break that habit. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that fresh sourdough with butter beats most gentlemen as a breakfast companion, whatever their income.

A closing thought

None of this is necessarily as easy or efficient as driving 25 minutes to the supermarket and loading up once a week. A CSA means committing to a season before you know what it holds. A meat share means freezer space and trust that processing was done cleanly and kindly. An honor-system cooler means someone left their morning's work unlocked on the side of the road and trusted it would be there at the end of the day.

But that’s also the whole appeal. You end up knowing where your food came from, sometimes literally which field, which is worth something anytime and worth quite a lot in a summer when the news can’t say the same about a bag of lettuce.

If you want to send someone a piece of this place, Lakes & Peaks Provisions was built for that kind of gesture. And if you have a favorite grower, maker, or farmer, share it with the rest of us in the comments!

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Are You Building a Vacation or a Life?

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 20:01:42 GMT

What the Tuesday in February Tells You

The couple from California stood in the kitchen with their coats still on.

It was a Tuesday. Gray, low sky, the kind of winter light that doesn’t so much as illuminate as just sit there, leaden and vaguely ominous. The driveway had a skin of ice over old mud. Nobody had swept the porch. There was no fire in the woodstove, no bread in the oven, no golden hour coming through the windows to make the case for itself. There wasn’t anything staged or hallmark-y about any of the showings we went to togehther that afternoon.

And M. looked across the kitchen at S., who gave a slight nod. He turned to me and, coat on, said, “We could live here.”

Not I love it. Not this is amazing. Just the quiet, unglamorous math of a person checking his own reaction against a house that wasn’t trying to seduce him, or his partner.

That’s the moment I actually trust.

I don’t have to tell anyone how magical this place is in July.

But it’s funny because just this morning I was talking with a friend and colleague and we were both secretly admitting that July isn’t our favorite time up here. I mean, it’s demonstrably great. Golden light on the water. Sunsets that make you pause what you’re doing to stare every single night. The particular music of frogs and bugs and birds that are a soundtrack that city people download on an app and that you get for free outside your window.

And if you’re house hunting, chances are someone’s turned on every lamp and opened the windows to capture the breeze from whatever water or woods are nearest. Maybe there’s coffee brewing, or a candle going, or the listing agent has timed the whole thing so you arrive right when the lake is doing its best impression of a postcard. None of that is dishonest, of course. It’s just theater, and theater has a job: to make you feel something big, fast.

The problem is that fast feeling doesn’t tell you what you actually need to know. It tells you the house shows well. It doesn’t tell you whether you can live there on a day when its just you, in your sweats, on the couch, watching tv and drinking tea.

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The real test happens on the boring day

Here’s what I mean, concretely. Not metaphor. An actual Tuesday, which if you’re a long time reader is apparently the day of the week that I think nothing out of the ordinary ever happens.

Imagine its February instead of July for a minute.

The road to the house is private, and it hasn’t been plowed yet, and you’re doing the math in your head about who plows it and what that costs and whether you trust that math. You notice the grade of the driveway and you find yourself picturing it in February, ice under snow, and asking whether you’d feel confident backing out of it in the dark before work. Nobody staged that driveway for you. It’s just there, being itself, and your body is already rehearsing a version of your life on it.

Or you’re in town on a winter weekday afternoon and you find out what’s actually open. Not what’s open for the farmers market or the summer concert series. What’s open on a plain Tuesday in February, when the tourists are gone and the town is just being a town. The coffee counter, or the transfer station, or the hardware store where somebody might ask if you’re new around here. You either want to be the kind of person who talks to that person, or you don’t. That’s not a small thing. That’s most of what daily life here is actually made of.

And increasingly, some of this test happens before you’ve set foot on the property at all. I’ve walked buyers through houses over video, camera panning slowly past a woodstove and a mudroom and a driveway they’ll never have seen in person until the day they move in. It’s a strange kind of decision-making, trusting your gut, and someone you’ve never met, through a screen. But in fact it isolates the same question a live showing muddies with light and lemonade: does something in you settle, or does it leave you with more questions than before.

This is a test of you, not the house

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying today. I’m not saying (today) visit in the off season to see the “real” version of a town, and I’m not saying (today) winter reveals the truth about a property’s bones. Those are worthwhile exercises, and I’ve made the arguments for why both of them are good things to do or think about elsewhere.

This is a narrower and, I think, more critical test. It’s not what the ordinary day reveals about the house or the town. It’s what the ordinary day reveals about you. Whether you’re the kind of person who can find something steadying in a gray Tuesday with wet leaves stuck to the steps, or whether you need the golden hour to feel sure. Neither answer is wrong. But only one of them tells you the truth before you’ve signed anything.

Most people go looking for the right house. Some go looking for the right lake, or the town that feels like them. Fewer people go looking for the truth about their own reaction to an unremarkable day. But its precisely that search that actually saves you from a bad decision, because a house, or a lake, or a town that only works in July is a one that’s only telling you part of what your life there will be.

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So if you’re starting to look, or thinking about starting to look, here’s the only homework I’d give you: picture the most ordinary version of a day there. Not the vacation version. The version with the ice on the steps and the grocery run and and the dog needing to go out. Sit with what your gut does with that image before you sit with what the listing photos do.

If something in you settles, that’s information. If something in you resists, that’s information too.

Either way, you’ll know more than most people do before they ever make an offer.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Turns Out Everything Old Is New Again

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:53:04 GMT

I’ve been writing about this place for just over a year now, and I’ve realized that there are some themes that I’ve been circling, sometimes without naming them.

I’ve written that the Lakes Region isn’t a summer, it’s a year, and that loving it means loving the November Tuesday along with the July Saturday. I’ve written a settling-in guide for newcomers about learning your neighbors’ names and sitting quietly through your first town meeting before you earn the right to speak at one. I’ve written about second home owners doing a kind of math nobody teaches you, not the carrying costs; the identity math, the quiet question of whether you’re still the person this place appealed to or whether you’ve become someone else. Three different piecesfor different readers and underneath all of them, the same handful of questions. How is it that this place is defined by seasons? What happens when the pull to develop it meets the pull to protect it? Who actually gets to belong here, and who decides?

I didn’t set out to build toward a history series. But what can I say, once an academic, always a nerd I guess? So, I’ve been building toward one anyway.

Here’s what I’m inviting you to follow along with, and honestly, it will probably take us more than a year or so to get there. Once a month, I’m going to look back. Not in a straight history-class way, not a syllabus with dates you’re supposed to memorize, but chronologically, starting before any of us were here and moving forward from there, through specific people and places and moments that actually happened in this region. A fishing camp. A road. A mill. A lake that needed protecting from something nobody saw coming. A woman that kept a farm running while the men were at war. I’m going to try to tell those stories the way I’d tell you about a house or a lake or a town, with real names and real specifics, not composites.

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And I want to be honest about why. It’s not nostalgia. It’s that I don’t think the things we’re wrestling with right now in this region are new ideas or arguments or positions. I think they’re old ones, dressed differently for each era, and understanding what they looked like before helps me understand what they actually are now, underneath the current version. So most pieces in this series is going to reach forward, at least a little, into where we still are today, even when today’s answer is messy or contested or something we haven’t agreed on yet.

Three threads are going to run through all of it, and I want to name them plainly instead of making you dig for them.

The first is seasonal rhythm. Long before I ever wrote a sentence about the Lakes Region being a year and not a summer, this place was already organizing itself entirely around the turn of the seasons, when the fish ran, when the ground would hold a garden, when a family moved from a summer village to a winter one. That rhythm didn’t start with year-round residents like me deciding to stay through February out of stubbornness or love. It’s the oldest fact about this region there is, and everything since, farming, tourism, the whole idea of a lake house, has had to answer to it one way or another.

The second is the pull between preserving this place and developing it. I’ve written about towns that guard their residential zoning like scripture and towns that welcomed every dollar that showed up. I’ve talked about how home prices here climbed far faster than almost anyone predicted, observed that second home ownership has become both an economic lifeline and a genuine strain on what a town can hold. None of that started with the current market. It started the first time someone looked at this land and had to decide whether to use it up or take care of it, and that decision has been getting made and remade, generation after generation, ever since.

The third is who gets to belong here, and how that’s shifted. I’ve written a guide for newcomers about earning belonging slowly, through small consistent choices instead of grand gestures. What I didn’t say outright, though I think it was underneath every line of it, is that this region has been asking some version of that question since approximately 1680. Who counts as from here. What you have to do, or endure, or give up, to be let in. Who gets pushed to the edges when the answer changes. That question doesn’t have a clean resolution now, and it didn’t have one in any of the earlier eras either. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

I don’t know exactly how each piece in this series is going to land yet, and I think that’s honestly part of why I want to write it. I live in a house that’s two hundred and fifty seven years old, and I work with people actively building a version of the good life for who they are and what they want to do in the next season. Understanding not just the here and now, but also the here and then can only enrich our shared community.

So that’s where we’re headed. One piece a month, working forward through time, and every one of them circling back, eventually, to right here.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

The Honest Summer

Keys to the Lakes — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:54:38 GMT

When we moved up here, it was in part to fulfill a long-held homesteading fantasy. One of the first instantiations of that dream, other than the land and the old farmhouse, was the addition of two young Great Pyrenees. These dogs have been bred for generations to guard something, to make independent decisions, and to roam while doing these things. I got them some very fancy collars that were supposed to work like an invisible fence — a signal that buzzes when they hit the boundary, meant to turn them around before they get any further. We trained for weeks. The trouble is that the alert was never quite stronger than their curiosity. They’d feel it, pause, and go exploring anyway. I could watch their path on my phone and was frankly impressed by the amount of territory they considered worth guarding.

And, while I’m sure no one loved it, most of my neighbors would casually report, “saw the dogs, headed toward’s J.’s house” and not really mind it because they never did any damage and they never stayed for long. Except for when they went across the road to my neighbor G.’s house. She has lovely gardens and a lot of livestock and an LGD of her own. She wasn’t happy with their intrusions, peaceful as they were and of course she was in the right. Even so, I could never fully blame them. I keep promising them something more interesting to guard than a dozen chickens and haven’t delivered. And I kind of want to go hang out in her gardens, too, they’re lovely. Eventually I admitted the “training” I kept doing on boundaries wasn’t working and I put up a six-foot fence with more authority than a beep. G. and I made peace, though I don’t think she’s going to be inviting me over for tea in the garden anytime soon. And my other neighbors chuckled that this city girl finally learned the lesson. Good fences really do make good neighbors.

Here’s the deeper thing, though. In a way, that whole experience is a microcosm of life up here. It’s all yours, but how you enjoy it is limited in different ways at different times of the year. And understanding the rules…and when they can be broken is a key lesson to living well here. So, yeah, I understand the ignoring-the-boundary part better than I’d like to admit, because I do it too, every July.

In May, Lake Winnipeesaukee at six in the evening is mine. I mean that almost literally — one other car in the lot where I launch my kayak, usually a fisherman who nods and doesn’t talk, which is its own kind of hospitality. I launch and paddle for hours without seeing a single motor boat, I listen to see if any of the loons have returned, and I drive home.

By the third Saturday in July, the same lake is crisscrossed with sails and motorboats, and music from somebody’s jetski carries further than they think it does. If I’m going to swim or kayak, I will be constrained to a small cove or a friends private beach. I know this before I go. I know exactly what a Saturday afternoon on Winni looks like in July, the same way my dogs know where the fence line is. And some weeks I go anyway, because the pull toward that water is stronger than my good sense about the crowd I’ll find there. The lake didn’t change, even though it feels like an entirely different place. What changed is how much patience the season asks of me for the privilege of being in it.

That’s the part I didn’t understand before I lived here year-round — that summer isn’t one season happening to everybody equally. It’s several different summers, happening on parallel tracks, stacked on the same water, depending on what your reason for being here is.

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My inbox in July is full of a summer I don’t fully get to have. Friends who are retired up here invite me to a day of boating, a talk at the library, lunch on a patio somewhere, trivia night at the tavern. Their version of the season has no weekly planner and no clock defining it — Tuesday and Saturday are the same to them, and an afternoon can stretch as long as the conversation wants it to. I say yes when I can and no far more often than I want to, and somewhere underneath the no there’s a small nugget of envy. I know that version of summer is coming for me eventually. It’s just not here yet.

The visitors have a different summer still, one I encounter every time I walk into town. At 7:15 most mornings in most months, Lino’s means a stool at the counter and coffee poured before I’ve fully sat down, quiet enough to read half an article or chat with with a neighbor while my youngest finishes his hash browns before his shift at the market in Wakefield. In July, 7:15 means standing by the door behind two families who got up early on vacation because someone told them the pancakes were worth it. They’re right, for what it’s worth. I’ve learned to eat at home July mornings and save Lino’s for the months when it’s mine again in the way it is the rest of the year. I don’t resent those visitors for this. A family on day four of a week they saved all year for is operating on a completely different clock than I am — every hour has to count for them in a way it doesn’t have to for someone who’ll still be here in October.

Parking in Wolfeboro tells the same story. From October to May, I pull into a quiet town, park just outside the office, and am inside in 30 seconds. In July, it’s two or three loops, sometimes a spot three streets further out than I’d like. I don’t mind this at all, mostly because of what happens once I’m out of the car. Main Street in July looks like something built for a movie — kids with pigtails and fishing rods eating ice cream while they head back towards the water, parents pushing strollers with the specific exhaustion of people on day four of that same hard-earned week, the Mount Washington’s horn sounding as she docks to take on another round of passengers seeing all of this for the first time. I walk a little slower in July than I do in February. Not because I have to. Because there’s a version of delight happening around me that’s worth witnessing, even from the outside of it.

Book club has learned not to count on me between June and Labor Day. So has my knitting circle. This is the quieter cost, the one nobody mentions when they’re selling you on moving here full-time. It isn’t the traffic or the crowds. It’s that the rhythms that make a place feel like home instead of scenery go dormant for a season, because everyone who runs the diner or teaches the class or organizes the meeting is also working the extra shifts the season demands of people who still have to make a living to live here.

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Most evenings, once the day’s obligations are done, I pick up the kids and drive away from the crowded big lake to a smaller one — Wentworth some nights, Lovell on others. I float on my back for an hour or so, sometimes less, because there’s a dinner to get to or a kid to drop off somewhere. The loons sound like grief or like joy depending on the day I’ve had. The peaks shift from green to blue to orange and back to blue while the light changes and the evening approaches. It’s a shorter version of summer than my retired friends get and a less intense one than those visiting get. It’s just mine, built around the edges of a life I’m still working to build here, and most nights that’s more than enough.

On the way home, there’s usually a roadside stand with corn and tomatoes still warm from the vine and the just set sun. I eat the tomatoes in the car like apples, because someone grew them ten minutes from where I’ll sleep tonight, and I’ll be here again tomorrow to buy more.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

So You Want to Buy an Old Farmhouse

Keys to the Lakes — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 23:36:17 GMT

This series started at the entry level of water access, then moved up through the $750K tier and into the multi-million-dollar waterfront, then turned inland to see what your money buys away from the water. Each installment isolated one variable: proximity, privacy, what kind of unique you were paying for.

This one seeks to deepen the series, because the farmhouse isn’t a price tier. The four houses featured below run from $425,000 to $1.25 million, and they’re all the same category of purchase. The variable isn’t just price. It’s how much of the conversation with the house has already happened, and how much of it is going to be yours.

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I say conversation deliberately. As regular readers know, I live in a house that turned 257 this year, and it talks. It tells you when the wind is blowing harder than it was yesterday. It tells you which windows want attention before which winter. You don’t own a house like this so much as hold up your end of an exchange that started long before you and will keep going after. What you’re deciding, when you buy one, is where in that exchange you want to enter.

The Deacon Chesley house, and the least expensive way into this piece at $152 per finished square foot. The hand-hewn timber frame is exposed through the main living space, there’s an attached art studio with its own entrance, and two of the bedrooms have their own working fireplaces that have been throwing heat since Washington’s first term.

Here’s the detail worth noticing: the listing says the first floor was completely remodeled between 2016 and 2019. Read that again for what it doesn’t say. The renovation stopped at the top of the winding staircase. When someone tells you precisely which part of a house was redone, they’re also telling you which part wasn’t.

The other quiet fact is the road. Hollow Hill goes from pavement to gravel before you reach the house. Public and town-maintained, yes, but gravel in the Lakes Region means you and mud season are going to know each other on a first-name basis, every April, forever.

What this house demands: finishing someone else’s paragraph. The first floor reflects the last owners’ taste and budget. The second floor is waiting to reflect yours, and 1792 post and beam does not take drywall-and-done answers.

The second of three farm homes on the east side of High Street, and the one where a current owner grew up when it was still a dairy farm. The milk was processed in the lower level of the house. The 33 by 33 barn still stands, metal-roofed and recently shored up. Fifteen acres of open field roll east toward the hills.

At $286 per square foot, it’s the most expensive house in this piece by that measure, which sounds backwards until you realize you’re not buying square footage. You’re buying the fields.

And here is the line buried in the middle of the listing that matters most: the land is in current use. That’s a property tax program, and it’s a gift while you leave the fields as fields. The moment you carve off a lot or build on that acreage, you trigger a land use change tax. The land is inexpensive to hold and expensive to change. Know that going in, because it should shape what you think this property is for.

The sellers are also honest in a way I appreciate: they’ve lived here six months a year lately, the well is a dug well, the septic is older and will eventually need replacing, and the house needs some work to be a year-round home again. It’s being sold furnished, which tells you something about the kind of goodbye this is.

What this house demands: patience with systems that were sufficient for the life being lived, and a plan for the life you intend to live. A dug well and a 1900 farmhouse kept as a summer place will meet a year-round family with a list of updates and improvements that you should take into consideration before you fall in love and sign.

Believed to be among the oldest surviving homesteads in North Sandwich, sitting on a knoll with the Ossipee Range in view and a year-round pond across the road. Wide pine floors, gunstock corners, hand-hewn beams, southern light, stone walls running the property lines, and a barn roughly 75 feet long. The town lists suitable uses that include maple sugar, which in Sandwich is not a decorative suggestion.

Now notice what the listing doesn’t mention, anywhere: a heating system. A septic update. A well. Electrical work. For a property this thoroughly described, the silence on mechanicals is the loudest thing on the page. And when you look into the disclosures, it’s honest: the systems date to 1974. The word the listing leans on is restore, and it means it. This is the house where the conversation hasn’t started yet. You’d be starting it and it might be an intense one.

What this house demands: a restoration budget you build before you offer, not after you close, and the temperament to spend years at it. A 75-foot barn is a magnificent thing and also its own line item, indefinitely. This is the purchase for the buyer who has read about what a colonial actually asks of you and answered, out loud, yes.

The other end of the spectrum. An 1880 farmhouse on a former potato farm, bordering 8,000 acres of conservation land, restored top to bottom over five years. The sellers hired a plasterwork specialist whose résumé includes Strawbery Banke, brought in a structural engineer, redid the electrical and plumbing, planted an orchard, and got town approval for a 1,288 square foot ADU above the four-car garage. The listing says you’re not buying a project home that becomes a part-time job, and for once that claim has receipts.

The detail I’d flag sits in the fine print: the road frontage is listed as TBD, and the road itself is a dead-end dirt road. That’s the price of never seeing another house in any direction. You’re the last address the plow reaches, or you’re plowing it yourself, and in March that distinction is not academic.

What this house demands: comfort with the idea that you’re paying $277 a square foot for someone else’s finished vision, and you’ll live inside their choices, good as they are. It also demands a farmer’s hours, or a farmer’s hire. Fields, orchards, and gardens do not maintain themselves out of gratitude for having been restored.

What this series has been about

We’ve moved from entry-level water access up through the price tiers, out to the multi-million-dollar waterfront, then inland, and now sideways, into a category that runs the whole price range at once. The farmhouse installment sits here on purpose: it’s the clearest proof that what you’re buying is never just the number. Four houses, one category, an $825,000 spread, and the real difference between them isn’t cost. It’s whether you want to finish a conversation, maintain one, start one, or purchase one already resolved.

If one of these houses has been sitting in your head since you scrolled past it, I’m happy to talk through what it would actually ask of you. Even if you’re just thinking out loud.

Here’s to knowing what you’re actually looking for.
🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

What You Do After the Answer Lands

Keys to the Lakes — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:00:03 GMT

There’s a particular kind of quiet that shows up after you’ve finally let yourself trust something. Not the loud quiet of a hard no. The other kind. You’ve stopped needing to explain the pull. You’ve stopped running it through the spreadsheet one more time to see if it still holds up. Somewhere in the last few weeks, without announcing it to anyone, you let yourself believe that the place that kept showing up in your head actually is the answer.

And then nothing happens.

That’s the part nobody prepares you for. You expect the recognition to carry its own momentum, like a door that unlocks and swings open on its own. It doesn’t. I’ve watched people sit in this exact room for months. Sometimes longer. Not because they were wrong about what they recognized. Because trusting a pull and rebuilding your actual life around it are two entirely different muscles, and the second one is harder than anyone tells you.

I remember the week I stopped needing to defend, even to myself, why this particular stretch of woods between two lakes was the one I couldn’t stop thinking about. That took about four days. Believing it, fully, quietly, without hedging. Then it took another eight months before I did anything real about it. I mean, I was obsessively looking at houses on zillow and realtor.com and I even signed up for some weird list for houses going to auction that even now as a realtor I don’t really understand. Eight months of knowing but not hitting “contact agent” on the sites, and eight months of not moving. I’d tell people at dinner I was “weighing my options,” as though I hadn’t already decided I was moving and simply hadn’t started acting like it yet.

I want to name that gap honestly, because I don’t think enough people do.

It isn’t hesitation, exactly, though it looks like hesitation from the outside. It’s closer to vertigo. You’ve been living inside a version of this decision for so long that the version has its own furniture. It’s comfortable in there. You get to keep the dream soft-focus and unfinished edges of what your new home and life will look like. Moving means trading that room for a much more specific one: a real listing agent, a real house that has the right garden but maybe not the garage you really thougt was a must, a number that isn’t a nice round figure anymore. Ultimately it means the unglamorous logistics nobody puts in the brochure, and that would be really nice to outsource to an AI bot or another human. Forwarding your mail. Finding a vet. And a pharmacy. Figuring out who plows a driveway and services a septic you don’t own yet. Telling your book club who have been friends for 12 years now, out loud, not in the “we’ve talked about this” way but in the “I made a call today” way.

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None of that is the same work as the work you already did. The recognition was internal. This next part is external, and it doesn’t happen by thinking about it harder.

Here’s what I’ve noticed, watching a lot of people move through this specific stretch: the gap doesn’t close because you find more certainty. You already have the certainty, or you wouldn’t be stuck here instead of somewhere earlier in the process. It closes because you do one small, real, external thing, and then you do the next right thing and then the next. It’s the difference between window shopping and trying on the outfit.

A few things I’ve watched actually work, not as a checklist, but because they share the same quality: they’re small enough to not feel like an entire second job, and they’re real enough to count.

Pick one Tuesday, not a weekend, and drive up. An ordinary Tuesday in whatever season it currently is, when nobody’s performing anything for you and the town isn’t dressed up for visitors. You’re not house hunting that day. You’re finding out what a boring day here actually feels like in your body, which is a different question than what a beautiful day feels like.

Make one call that has your name attached to it. Not a browsing session on Zillow at eleven at night, which is a way of staying in the room with the furniture. An actual call to an actual person, even if its just to ask a question you already mostly know the answer to. The content of the call matters less than the fact that it happened and someone else now knows you’re serious. Though, reality: if that call is to a realtor, you will almost certainly start to get calls and emails back. If you’re not ready for that, pick the town hall and ask about street cleaning, or the school district to ask about the registration process, or the grocery store to see if they carry your favorite cheese.

Say the sentence out loud to one person who isn’t in your head. Not “we’ve been thinking about it.” The other version. “I want to do this.” Say it to your spouse, your sister, a friend who will gently pressure test the idea or celebrate it with you. Something changes when a decision exists outside your own skull. The first friends I told I was going to buy a house in the lakes region didn’t say, we’ll miss you, don’t go. Lol. They said, awesome, we won’t have to rent a place every summer anymore.

None of those steps are buying a house. They’re not supposed to be. They’re the small, specific proof that the door isn’t actually locked, it’s just closed, and it opens the way doors open: because you did something; you turned the handle, or leaned your shoulder into it, or even just approached slowly with expectation.

I still catch myself in the safe, soft room sometimes, three summers into living here full time. Not about the move anymore. About other decisions; about whether to fence in the whole property, or get goats for real next spring. The instinct to keep circling something in your head instead of touching it doesn’t disappear just because you made one big leap already. You get faster at noticing when you’re doing it, though. That’s most of what changes.

If you’re standing in this particular gap right now, hand near the handle, I don’t think the fact that you haven’t turned it yet means you were wrong about what you decided. I think it probably just means nobody’s told you, plainly, that the next right move is small. It doesn’t have to be the whole thing. It has to be real.

If you want to talk through what your one small, real thing might be, I’m around. Not to move you faster than you’re ready to move. Just to help you figure out which door you’re actually standing in front of. And if you just call to ask about school registration, I’ve done it. If you want to know which roads which towns plow last, I’ll tell you. If you want to know the only store in an hours drive that carries Gloucester Cheddar with Chives…I found it. And I’ll only put you on a list if you want me to, promise.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes