No one from any trade is coming by my 257-year-old house to give me a quote that will make me wince and then, eventually, sigh with contentment when the faucet runs hot or the fire actually draws right. No showings. No inspections on a house under contract. No appointment with a maker to pick up the next batch of candles or honey or soap for Lakes & Peaks. No boat ride with a friend, no drinks with a client. Just an open day.

I’ll be honest: as a small business owner twice over, open days sometimes give me anxiety before they give me anything else. The calendar feels like it should be fuller than this. But they also tend to remind me of something, which is that the reason I’m building two businesses around celebrating this place and welcoming people to it well is this: how good this place is, even on a Tuesday when nothing in particular is happening.

These days don’t get posts the way the Fourth of July does, or Bike Week, or ice-out. Nobody photographs a Tuesday. But these are the days that have actually held this place together; for the people who’ve lived here since the 1760s, and, longer than that, for the people who stewarded this land since time immemorial, long before anyone’s ancestors arrived with a governors writ and called it theirs. The fabric of a place isn’t woven just from its holidays. It’s woven from its Tuesdays.

So here’s what this one actually looked like.

I got up early and sat on the back steps in a soft rain, coffee in hand, watching the dogs stretch out their limbs one at a time like they were testing whether the day was worth getting up for. I fed the chickens and stole their eggs for my eldest’s omelet. I sat with my journal and pulled my cards, the way I do most mornings, less to predict anything than to notice what my body already knows before my brain catches up to it.

I threw in a load of laundry. I checked Lakes & Peaks orders against what needs to ship this week. I texted a client about what an inspection actually turns up on a house that’s been settling since before electricity, and texted another about whether a piece of land might be subdividable, then texted the listing agent to ask if his clients even have a survey yet. I drafted Sunday’s post about Fourth of July events across the region. I started a list, because I love a list, for a festival Lakes & Peaks is doing in August that feels impossibly far away and, experience tells me, absolutely is not.

Later, I’ll walk one of the dogs down to a neighbor’s farm. She’s going to talk me through what it’ll take to process the fifty meat chickens I went in on with her this spring. I might keep going past her place to the farmstand down the road, where another neighbor has the green thumb I was apparently not issued, and pick up strawberries or lettuce I had no hand in growing myself.

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There will be an hour in the hammock. Possibly two, if I’m honest with myself, which I’m trying to be more of lately. I’ll listen for birds and have to fight the urge to pull out the app and identify every one I don’t recognize, because sometimes being present in a moment matters more than being right about what’s in it.

At some point I’ll grab a beer in the kitchen, and my feet will rest on the same wooden boards some other woman’s did two hundred years ago, or a hundred and fifty, or seventy-five, or fifty. The kids will slam in and out the door on their way to wherever teens go on a June afternoon. It will be, by any reasonable measure, a lovely day. Part work. Part rest. All of it, somehow, beauty.

None of this will end up anywhere but here, in this newsletter, on a Tuesday nobody was watching. There’s no after-photo for a day like this. No before, either, really; it doesn’t resolve into anything. It just happens, and then it’s the next day, and somehow that’s exactly the point.

We’ve gotten used to measuring a life, or a house, or a region, by its highlight reel; the show-stopping renovation, the leaf-peeping weekend, the dramatic ice-out video that gets passed around every March. And those moments are real, and worth marking. But they’re not actually where the substance of life is. The substance is in the unremarkable Tuesday that doesn’t make it into anyone’s story, including, usually, your own.

If you’re the kind of person who’s drawn to a place like this, I’d gently suggest that what you’re actually drawn to isn’t the 4th of July version. It’s the slow one. It’s a region where most of what matters is quietly accumulating in the background of an ordinary day, whether or not anyone’s there to see it.

Wanna know what I discerned from my cards this morning: a slow day isn’t an absence of progress. It’s the thing being stored up. I think that’s true of a friendship, or a business, or a garden, or a region. I think it might be the truest thing about what it actually means to live somewhere, rather than just visit it.

So: here’s to the open Tuesdays. The ones that don’t make the highlight reel, don’t get the post, don’t need to. They’re not what we show people about this place.

They’re what it’s actually made of.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

That’s the trick of rain here, the windows open part. You don’t shut the house up against it the way you might in a city, where rain means puddles and umbrellas and getting your shoes wet on the way to the train. Here it means something closer to permission. To stay in bed a little longer. To let the dogs come back in soaked and smelling like, well, wet dog, and decide that’s a fair trade for the version of morning you just had.

If your time in the Lakes Region is short, a rainy day is the enemy. I understand that completely. You came for the blue and the green and the white wake behind a boat, and you should get it. But if you live here, or if you’re here for the whole season, rain stops being an inconvenience and starts being something you find yourself hoping for. Praying for, even, depending on the year. Last spring it rained every weekend for fifteen weeks straight, and even I, a person who likes rain more than is reasonable, was done with it by week six. This year we’re starting the summer in a real deficit, with 14 inches needed over the next 6 weeks if we’re to escape this drought. So the grown-up part of me wants every drop we can get.

The romantic part of me wants it for entirely different reasons.

Rain is what makes the butterfly bush outside my home office window go from pretty to ridiculous, this enormous green thing that on sunny days hums with bees and dragonflies and butterflies all at once, like it’s running its own small airport and market all at once. My landscaping otherwise is nothing to brag about. If you’re picturing Grey Gardens, you’re closer than I’d like to admit; we’re somewhere between that and the Jungle Book, and my homeownership skills apparently prove the adage that the cobblers kids go barefoot. But the bush doesn’t care. The bush is thriving. And so are the bugs and birds that appreciate my negligent rewilding.

Rain also does something to the pace of the season that I notice every single time. Summer here runs at a particular speed, a kind of cheerful carnival hum, boats and ice cream and everyone trying to fit as much daylight into a day as physically possible. Rain puts a hand on that and says, gently, not today. And once you stop fighting it, a rainy day in the Lakes Region turns out to be one of the better ways to actually get to know this place, instead of just the sunny postcard version of it.

So. What to do, if you find yourself with a wet Thursday and no real plan.

Go out on the water anyway. Not the big lake, maybe, but something smaller and more forgiving. Lake Wentworth or Crescent Lake, with the Smith River connecting the two if you want a paddle that actually goes somewhere. Bring a dry change of clothes for the car, because you will be cold loading the kayaks back up, and there is nothing more humbling than driving home in a wet bathing suit while the heat fights a losing battle against your windows in June.

Lean all the way into the romance and atmosphere at Castle in the Clouds. You’ll miss some of the views it’s famous for, the ones that make it onto every postcard rack in the region. But the trail past the waterfall is, if anything, better in weather like this, all mist and damp stone and the sound of water doing what water does. And the house tour itself doesn’t care what the sky is doing. It’s Downton Abbey with mountain views, a walk through a way of living that’s entirely gone now, and somehow more of a vibe with rain on the windows.

Find a museum, or better, several. The Libby Museum is closed now, which is a real loss, but there’s still plenty here for a curious afternoon. The New Hampshire Boat Museum has locations in both Wolfeboro and Moultonborough and tells the story of this region the way almost nothing else does, through the boats people built and loved on these lakes. The Wright Museum in Wolfeboro covers the WWII home front specifically, which is a different and somehow more personal angle than most war museums take. Several of their volunteer docents were children around here in those years and adults for the subsequent wars…and they have stories. The Wolfeboro Historical Society runs the Clark Museum complex a few buildings deep into the town’s past. And nearly every town up here has its own small historical society, usually open limited hours, usually run by someone who has been volunteering there for twenty years and will tell you more than you knew you wanted to know, in the best way. If you want to go further afield, the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner is a bit of a drive but worth it, one of the more thoughtful collections in the state on Abenaki history and the deeper story of who was here stewarding this land and its waters long before any of us.

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Check what the libraries are doing. This region has an almost shocking number of libraries for its population, and every single one of them runs a full slate of summer programming. Talks, classes, mah jong tournaments, cribbage nights, the occasional thing you didn’t know you needed until you saw it on the calendar. Scan a few town library websites before you write off a rainy day. Someone, somewhere nearby, is giving a talk or gathering a group on something interesting this afternoon.

Eat your way around the lake. I wrote a whole piece on this earlier this week and a rainy day is a perfect excuse to work through that list. Nothing pairs better with weather like this than someone else doing the cooking. Or scoring one of the Adirondack Chairs at Dox because everyone else is elsewhere and watching the rain fall on the water while the Mount Washington comes in and out and does its timeless thing and you drink giant Aperol Spritz’ all afternoon.

Borrow board games while you’re at the library, and build an afternoon around them. Get the whole crew, whatever combination of family and friends you’ve got under one roof, out onto a covered porch with a stack of games and let the rain be the soundtrack instead of the obstacle.

Or just stop entirely. Patio, blanket, the kind of nap that feels slightly naughty and entirely indulgent on a June afternoon. You will be shocked you need a blanket in June. You will use it anyway.

Or leave town for the day, since the weather forty minutes away might be a completely different story. Head north into Conway, browse the shops, ride the scenic railroad, take the littles to Clark’s Bears or Santa’s Village if that’s where you are in life. Or go south to the Seacoast instead. Walk the beach in the rain, which has its own particular appeal. The Seacoast Science Center has a genuinely great playground next door, plus tide pools that my teenagers and my three-year-old niece are, against all odds, equally captivated by. That’s a rare age range to please all at once, and worth the drive on its own. Wander into Exeter for lunch, or spend the day in Portsmouth touring the colonial houses at Strawberry Banke.

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Here’s the thing about rain in a place like this. It’s not a blot on the season. It’s part of it, the part that makes the bright days mean something by contrast, the part that fills the wells back up after a dry year, the part that lets you stay in bed a little longer with the windows open and not feel one bit guilty about it.

We need the rain this year more than usual. But even on an ordinary year, this lady still loves it.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

What do you love to do on a rainy day?

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The food will surprise you. But not always in the ways you expect, and not always on the first try.

I spent over a decade in Boston and lived in Philadelphia, PA and Santiago de Chile prior to Boston. I ate well in those places. Really well. The kind of well where you have a neighborhood Italian place that knows your order, a cocktail bar that takes its ice program seriously, and a rotating list of new restaurants to work through that never quite gets shorter. Those cities have depth. Real depth. The kind that comes from density and ambition and the intentional juxtapositions of cultures and cuisines. Oh, and culinary talent that can actually afford to stay.

The Lakes Region…is different. I say this without (much, serious) complaint because the reasons make complete sense. Restaurant margins are brutal under the best conditions. A five-month tourist season makes the math even harder. Recruiting culinary talent to a rural market, away from the network and the energy of an urban food scene, is genuinely difficult. Chef-entrepreneurs take real risks here. The ones who make it work deserve credit for that.

And yet.

You can eat extraordinarily well up here. You just have to know where to look, and sometimes you have to know what to order.

This is my current, opinionated, entirely personal guide. I’ve eaten at all of these places. I only included the ones I’d send you to without hesitation - and if I’ve mentioned a particular dish or drink I’m not saying you have to have it…but I won’t be held responsible if you go off list (wink wink).

For an Italian dinner that puts the North End to shame

If you can get a reservation at Bernini’s in Meredith, take it. I have never had a bad meal there. More than that, I have never walked out feeling like a customer. They make you feel like family from the first visit, which is either a remarkable skill or actual warmth; after enough meals there, I’ve stopped trying to figure out which. Eat anything, eat everything. Start it out with a house cosmo and round it out with some amaretto on the rocks. You’re welcome.

If you want to go a little further, or you’re set on Italian, but can’t get into Bernini’s, head to Dante’s in Barrington. Start with the antipasto, the mushrooms are amazing. So far from the pickled slimy ones you get at the supermarket you’ll never settle for those again. They’re committed to keeping wine affordable so get a bottle or two of the Gavi. For your entree, the linguini with shellfish and the pork medallions over polenta are both the kind of dish you’ll think about on the drive home. I should also tell you about the cannoli, though I came to it reluctantly. I generally prefer a cocktail to dessert. A dining companion finally talked me into sharing one and I’ll admit it: I finally understood what all the fuss was about. The ricotta filling was creamy and savory in equal measure. The shells were crisp in a way that told you they’d been filled to order, not hours ago. If you’ve had a lot of mediocre cannoli, this one will recalibrate you.

The honest truth about menus around here

A lot of them look the same. There’s a Lakes Region Greatest Hits situation happening across a fair number of restaurants, and I say that with affection and mild frustration in equal measure. Burgers, ribs, chowder, chicken tenders, pizza, something with maple. Fine. Sometimes good. Rarely surprising.

So here’s how I actually navigate it: I go to certain places for specific things, and I let the rest of the menu be what it is.

What I order, and where

Pizza: Brick oven, go to Nolan’s in Wolfeboro. Non-brick oven, White Lake Pizza in Ossipee near Chocorua Lake is legitimately excellent and worth the drive.

Seafood: Fresh oysters and seafood at the Wolfetrap in Wolfeboro. For fried seafood, drive to Blue Bay Seafood in East Wakefield. Great for families; the kind of place where kids are genuinely welcome and the fish is the real thing.

Tacos: Taco Bay. Originally in Alton Bay, now also in Laconia. Go. Be adventurous.

Sushi and cocktails (and yes, both): Saka in Wolfeboro. The sushi is good. The cocktails are shockingly good. I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was, and I’ve been correcting for it ever since.

A really great steak: O Bistro in Laconia.

BBQ: two directions

If you’re willing to get on Route 16, Mr. Sippy’s in Rochester is the answer. Worth every mile.

If you want to stay Lakes Region central, Refuge BBQ and Mercantile in Tuftonboro is your spot. Different vibe, same commitment to doing it right.

Breakfast

I’ll be honest with you: I have never been a breakfast person. I’ve had exactly one recurring breakfast situation in my life up here, and it’s at Lino’s Diner in Wakefield. I go at least once a week, usually for a meeting, and I leave every time feeling like I’ve stumbled into the set of a 1960s sitcom. In the best possible way. You walk in, call out a hello, pick your own table. The coffee arrives before you’ve decided what you’re doing. Your regular toast shows up on its own. It is a specific kind of New England institution that is not being made anymore, and I hope it never changes.

Coffee

Harmony Coffee House in Wolfeboro. Go for the coffee and the community vibe, stay for the roast beef and horseradish sandwich at lunch. Seriously. Don’t skip it.

Mello Moose in Meredith.

Cup and Crumb in Moultonborough. Scones, eat all the scones. Also lots of gluten free options for my friends who need that.

Just drinks

Sometimes you want a view and a well-made cocktail and nothing else is required of the evening. Two answers:

Garwoods in Wolfeboro, waterfront. The Dox in Laconia, also waterfront. Both deliver on the drinks and both have views that earn what you pay for them.

For something with a completely different energy: the Wakefield Inn. The speakeasy here is quaint and cool and quiet and while they recently lost a fabulous bartender, the atmosphere holds its own. Harley Jack’s if you want a beer, spectacular views of the Ossipee Mountains, and wings that are a stand out in a place where every single restaurant has wings on th menu. It’s the kind of place where the scenery does most of the heavy lifting and the wings and burgers refuse to be upstaged.

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One I haven’t tried yet

Frida’s recently opened a new location in Gilford. It’s been on my list and I haven’t made it yet. If you’ve been, I genuinely want to hear what you thought. Drop it in the comments.

A closing thought

There are gaps up here. I notice them. I suspect anyone who has eaten well in a city and then moved somewhere smaller notices them too, and there’s a particular kind of craving that no amount of stunning lake views fully addresses. So if anyone reading this feels like opening an Indian restaurant or a Tapas and Wine bar, or a place that actually does justice to the amazing farm produce and meat on offer up here, let’s talk. I have zero dollars to invest, but lots of thoughts.

But there’s also this: the people who are cooking and farming and making things in this region are doing it because they love it. The margins don’t always make sense. The season is short. They stay anyway. That tends to produce food worth paying attention to.

Go find the tables worth finding. And, tell me what I’m missing out on, I’m always on the search for the next best meal.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

I’ve been a year-round resident of the Lakes Region for three years. Three years is enough to know where the ice goes out first on Lovell Lake and which local Facebook group will tell you the truth about the best Chinese food in driving distance and what the shoulder season actually feels like when you’re not checking out of a rental cottage on Sunday. It is not enough to know everything. I’m still learning. I say this not as a disclaimer but in awe — that after three years of choosing this place, I’m still being surprised by all that choice means.

The North Country I know differently. I know it the way you know a place you’ve returned to for half your life as a guest. North Conway, Jackson, the valley towns tucked up against the Whites. I know which weeks are impossible for parking at Cranmore and where to eat breakfast when the tourist spots have a line out the door. I know the particular quality of a March afternoon up there when the snow is still deep and the light has started to change. I know it well enough to notice things. I do not know it well enough to claim I understand it from the inside.

I want to write about both places anyway, because I think the comparison is worth making even imperfectly and because I think both places have such value for those looking for a life different than what they’re living right now.

First, a definitional note: when I say the North Country, I’m using a loose definition that some people will push back on. Technically, the North Country is Coos County — Lancaster, Colebrook, Pittsburg, the Great North Woods. Genuinely remote. A different set of realities entirely. NHPR did a series on this in 2019, Word of Mouth‘s North Country project, and one of the first things it tackled was exactly this question: where does the North Country actually begin? The answer, as it turns out, depends on who you ask.

I’m drawing my line at North Conway and up. The Mount Washington Valley, the villages along Route 302, the towns that orient their whole identity around the mountains rather than the water. Some purists will say that’s just the White Mountains, not the North Country at all. Fine. I’m less interested in the geography argument than in what that collection of places shares with the Lakes Region at the level of how people actually live there.

Here’s the story some tell about the two regions: the Lakes Region is summer and lakes. The North Country is winter and skiing. People split time accordingly. A camp on Winnipesaukee or Great East Lake from Memorial Day to Indigenous Peoples Day; ski weekends in Bartlett from January through March. The regions function, in this telling, as two continguous halves of a seasonal New Hampshire life. You get your water and your mountains and you spend the intermezzos in Boston or New York and call it a full year.

This is not entirely wrong. The seasonal economy in both places is real and it shapes everything. But it is a visitor’s understanding of each place, and I think it flattens something true and rich about both of them.

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What actually defines year-round life in the Lakes Region is not the water, though the water is always in the background. It’s the relationship between the people who stay and the economy that was built for the people who visit. Every small business owner in a lake town knows the math: you make as much as you can in twelve to fifteen weeks and then the rest of the year becomes about the quieter, but just as critical, support of the year round folks. The restaurants that survive year-round do it by becoming something different in January than they are in July. More local. Quieter. Hubs of the community. The owners of those restaurants are often the same people coaching youth soccer and running the food pantry and showing up to planning board meetings. They are the connective tissue of a place that, from the outside, can look like it exists purely for summer visitors.

There’s an identity that comes with that. Year-round Lakes Region residents tend to have a particular relationship to the summer crowd that is warm and wry and not at all resentment but something in the neighborhood of pride. This is our place, it says quietly. You’re welcome here. You are part of what we love about this place. And you’re visiting something we live inside. And we know it in a different way. Not better, just different. That’s okay.

The North Country towns I have spent time in carry a version of the same thing, pitched only slightly differently. The ski economy is the organizing force rather than the lake economy, and it creates a slightly different community psychology. Skiing concentrates its visitors more intensely — a good snow year is genuinely good, a bad one is genuinely bad, and everyone in a valley town knows it. The relationship between the mountain and the town is more explicit, more economic, less easy to romanticize. When Cranmore or Attitash has a strong season, you feel it at the hardware store. When they don’t, you feel that too.

What I’ve noticed, as a fifteen-year guest, is that the North Country towns have a stronger orientation toward the working landscape than the Lakes Region does. Not that the Lakes Region lacks it; there are working farms and logging operations and trades people everywhere. But the mountains up north make the land’s indifference to human convenience more visible. The passes close. The weather moves faster. There’s a directness in how North Country towns talk about what they need, what they’re losing, what they’re trying to hold onto, that I’ve found bracing and honest.

Both regions are navigating a version of the same tension: how do you preserve what makes a place real when the economic pressure pushes everything toward serving visitors? How do you keep a school open when the year-round population is aging and the teachers and tradespeople that are the backbone of the community can’t afford the housing that the vacation market has inflated? These aren’t abstract questions. They show up at school board meetings. They show up in who can and can’t stay. And they connect the two places in more ways than one.

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The continguous-halves story — summer lakes, winter mountains — flattens some of this. It treats both regions as singular activities rather than rich and varied year-round communities. I drive the hour or so north regularly to have dinner at Stonehurst Manor or ride the cog railway up Mt. Washington. And I see stickers on my neighbors cars that show me they’re regulars at Loon or Attitash. Last week I went boating on Great East with some friends who own a camp there. They live most of the time up in Lincoln, we met on the slopes a decade ago and stayed in touch.

One thing that genuinely surprised me about life up here is the density of entrepreneurial artisans and craftspeople working quietly in both regions — potters, coffee roasters, candle makers, woodworkers — people building livelihoods from and inspired by the same landscape that draws visitors in. It's part of what led me to start Lakes & Peaks Provisions Co. in March 2026 with my sister and brother-in-law, who have a camp bordering the White Mountain National Forest near Loon. We wanted to offer our take on what's good and beautiful from smaller makers across the region to the visitors who love this place and the people who've made it home. And more than that, we wanted to contribute something back — some predictable income to the farmers, artisans, and craftspeople whose work makes these communities worth returning to. Because when they thrive, so does the place itself.

See, what both places actually are is more interesting and more complicated. They are year-round communities with year-round cultures and year-round stakes in their own futures, built around and sometimes in tension with the seasonal economies that bolster them. The people who live in them full-time have made a choice that goes beyond preferring a view. They’ve chosen a pace and a level of participation and a willingness to be present for the versions of these places that don’t appear in the travel content.

I’m three years into that choice. I’m still learning what I chose. I think that’s probably how it works.

Here’s to knowing when you’ve found your place.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Almost everyone who starts looking in the Lakes Region starts the same way.

They open a search, type “waterfront,” and wait to see what comes back. It’s not an unreasonable instinct. The water is why most people come here in the first place. The lakes are the thing you see in photos, the thing that pulls at you from a distance, the thing you’ve been imagining when you picture what your life could look like if you made the move.

But here’s what I’ve watched happen, again and again: buyers come in with waterfront as the assumption, and somewhere in the middle of the search — after they’ve seen what the price demands, after they’ve driven around and started to understand what this place actually is — the assumption starts to loosen. Not because they’ve given something up. Because they’ve started asking a better question.

Not: can I afford waterfront?

But: what kind of life am I actually trying to build here? And, what’s required for that life to be a reality instead of just an idea in my head?

Those are different questions. And they don’t always lead to the same answer.

Some of the best lives being lived in this region right now are fifteen minutes from the water. Not on it. The people living them have lake access when they want it — a town beach, a friend’s dock, a public boat launch — and the rest of the time they have something waterfront doesn’t always come with: land, history, a town they can walk through, mornings that belong entirely to them.

Three properties illustrate this better than I can explain it.

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160 Browns Ridge Road, Ossipee | $475,000 | 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms | 2,082 sq ft | Built 1930 | 12.10 acres

What this property offers: twelve acres of selectively harvested land with a network of paths and trails running through it. A cleared space in the rear of the lot where someone made a deliberate decision to create a gathering spot — not a deck, not a patio, just a place to be outside and feel the property around you. Fields and meadows that open toward glimpses of the Ossipee Mountains, the kind of view that doesn’t announce itself in a listing photo but settles into you over time.

The house is a 1930 ranch, 2,082 square feet, wood stove, cathedral ceiling, hardwood floors, a family room that opens onto a sunny rear deck. Seven rooms including a home office or den. A newer detached shed. Room on the property, according to the listing, to construct an additional structure if you want it.

At $228 per finished square foot, this is 12 acres in the shadow of the Ossipee Range for $475,000.

What this property costs beyond the purchase price is the honest thing to say here. Twelve acres requires attention. Trails don’t maintain themselves through mud season. A 1930 house, however livable and well-proportioned, will have its own list of things to tend to over time. This is not a property that asks nothing of you. It’s a property that gives back in proportion to how much you’re willing to engage with it.

The buyers this fits are people who want the land to be part of the life, not just the backdrop. People who have thought about what it means to walk your own property on a November morning when the light is low and the mountains are just visible through the tree line, and decided that sounds like exactly enough.

314 Sheridan Road, Moultonborough | $650,000 | 5 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms | 2,508 sq ft | Built 1850 | 3.16 acres

Moultonborough is one of the lowest tax towns in New Hampshire. That matters more than it sounds when you’re running the numbers on what a property actually costs to own year over year.

This 1850 Cape sits on just over three acres in that town, and it has been lived in and added to and cared for in the way that houses accumulate character across a long time. A gentle stream borders the property. A separate barn offers what the listing describes as possibilities for hobbies, storage, animals, or creative workspace — which is a careful way of saying the barn is genuinely useful but it’s not quite clear how, use your imagination. Owned solar panels. A large screened porch that overlooks the backyard. A first-floor primary suite with a clawfoot tub. A wood stove in the den. A fireplace in the living room. A hot tub outside.

Five bedrooms at $259 per square foot in a town that borders Lake Winnipesaukee without charging you for the proximity.

The stream is worth pausing on. It’s not a lake. It’s not waterfront in any sense the search algorithms will surface. But a property with moving water running along its edge has a particular quality — a sound, a draw, a reason to walk the perimeter in the evening that has nothing to do with acreage or square footage. People who’ve owned properties like this tend to mention the stream first when you ask them what they love about the place, which is something to sit with.

Moultonborough also means you are genuinely close to the lake. The public boat launches are a short drive. The marinas are accessible. The lake is part of your life here without being the thing your mortgage is secured against.

116 High Street, Wakefield | $374,900 | 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms | 3,180 sq ft | Built 1880 | 0.29 acres

The argument this property makes is different from the other two. It isn’t about land. It isn’t about acreage or trails or a barn waiting for a purpose. It’s about what it means to live in a town that is actually alive.

116 High Street is an 1880 Colonial on Wakefield’s main street. Walking distance to local shops, restaurants, and the town center. Walking distance, also, to the town beach — which means lake access is present, just not attached to a deed. Three-plus fireplaces. A grand foyer. A covered porch. 3,180 finished square feet at $117 per square foot, which is the kind of number that makes people double-check the listing.

The recent capital improvements are done: roof in 2020, hot water heater in 2024, furnace in 2025. The heavy lifting on mechanicals has been handled.

What Wakefield offers that doesn’t show up in any field on the MLS sheet is the texture of a town with an actual center. A place where you can walk somewhere. Where the library is a short distance from your front door, not a twenty-minute drive. Where the rhythms of town life — the things happening on a Thursday afternoon in September, the people you recognize at the general store — are available to you not because you sought them out but because you live here.

A lot of buyers coming from suburban or urban environments underestimate how much they were relying on that texture. The ability to leave the house on foot and arrive somewhere. The sense of a place having a middle, a gravity, a reason people gather. Waterfront can give you beauty and water access. It can’t always give you that.

At $374,900, this is the least expensive property in this installment by a significant margin. R1 zoning also allows for a range of uses with a conditional use permit, which is worth a conversation with the town if you’re someone who works from home or is thinking about what a property like this could support beyond a primary residence.

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What the series has been about

We started at the entry point of what water access actually costs in this region. Moved up through what $750,000 and then multi-million dollar waterfront looks like and what you’re actually buying at each level.

This installment steps back from the water entirely — not as a consolation, but as a correction to an assumption.

The Lakes Region is often defined by its water and the lifestyle they give us. That’s true. But the towns, the land, the history, the mountain views, the streams running through back meadows — those exist independently of the waterfront market. And for buyers who stop typing “waterfront” long enough to ask what kind of life they’re actually trying to build, what comes back can be surprising.

A 1930 ranch on twelve acres facing the Ossipee Mountains. An 1850 Cape with a barn and a stream in a low-tax town that borders Winnipesaukee. An 1880 Colonial on a walkable main street with town beach access included in the zip code.

None of them are the lakes. All of them are the region.

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

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

And still. One of those places keeps coming back up for you.

Not because it won the analysis. In fact, it may have lost the analysis on several counts. Too remote. Too quiet. Not the one with the amenities, or the easy highway access, or the waterfront they’d imagined. But something about it won’t let them go, and they can’t quite say what. They’ve started to feel a little embarrassed about this. Like they should be able to explain it if it’s real.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after watching people find their next place, or not: the embarrassment is something to push through. The pull is the data.

Not the only data. Not a reason to ignore everything else. But it’s real, and it’s telling you something. Learning to read it, and being confident enough to listen to it, is better than any skill in a search.

The pull usually has a specific texture. It’s not enthusiasm, exactly — enthusiasm is almost a given, especially when something is new and you’re in the hopefulness of early research. This is different. It’s the thing that happens when you’re doing something entirely unrelated and a particular image surfaces. The cove at a certain hour. The way the tree line sits against the ridge. The quiet, or the energy, or the color of the water in late afternoon. Whatever it is, it keeps arriving without invitation.

I think what’s happening in those moments is the body processing something the mind hasn’t finished with yet. You visited. You stood on a dock or looked out from a dirt road or hiked down the path at the wrong time of day to see it at its best. And something registered. Not a conclusion — you didn’t come away certain of anything. Just a registration. A flag placed somewhere in you that says: here, this.

The mind goes home and does its work. The body keeps the flag.

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What makes this complicated is that the pull doesn’t always align with your stated preferences. Sometimes it lands on a lake you’d told yourself was too small, or the house is too off the beaten path, or the town is not the one with the name your friends would recognize. The pull doesn’t care about any of that. It recognized something else, and now you’re having to catch up to it.

I’ve watched people resist this, sometimes for a long time. Long enough to wonder whether they’re trying to convince themselves they want the “right” place or they actually want a particular one. The two things look similar from the outside. From the inside, they feel completely different. One has a restlessness to it — a quality of still searching even when you’ve technically decided. The other settles. Not all at once, not without work, and sometimes a little grief at losing the vision you thought was the dream. But it settles.

The place that keeps coming back is usually the one the body settled on before the mind was ready to let it.

Here’s the thing that makes the pull worth trusting: the lakes and the woods and even the towns are honest. More honest, in my experience, than a lot of the other things people use to make this decision.

A spreadsheet of criteria is built from what you currently know about yourself. Which is a useful starting point, but it’s incomplete. Most people, when they sit down to make a list, write the version of themselves they already understand — the preferences they can name, the lifestyle they already have. They don’t know yet what a new place, a new way of being, will ask of them. What they’ll discover they love about mud season, or about the particular quiet of a November morning beside the water, or about not being able to get to an exceptional restaurant without thirty minutes of driving on a Tuesday.

The pull seems to know something the list doesn’t. It’s operating on information that predates the criteria, or runs underneath it. Pattern recognition from the visit. From the smell of the air and the scale of the closest water and the temperature of the morning and whatever the light was doing. It absorbed the whole thing and it’s been holding it for you while you worked through everything else.

I’m not saying ignore the practical considerations. I’m saying: when the practical considerations keep coming out roughly even, and one place keeps showing up uninvited in your mind, that’s not noise. That’s signal.

The other thing I notice is that people often know sooner than they think. They arrived with Wolfeboro on the list and found themselves lingering on Alton. They were comparing lake houses and farm houses and realized they hadn’t thought about one of them since the drive home. They texted their Mom a photo from one place, didn’t bother with the other.

The body keeps score without being asked. Which means by the time someone tells me they can’t explain why one place won’t let them go, they often already know that’s the place for them. They just haven’t decided yet whether to trust what they know.

What I find myself saying, in those conversations: you don’t have to explain it. Explanation is for afterward, when you’re telling the story to someone who wasn’t there. The pull itself doesn’t require justification. It requires attention.

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I don’t live on the water. I’m in the woods smack dab in between Lake Wentworth and Lovell Lake. I did not arrive here through flawless decision-making (it means I’m farther from my closest family member than I was before I moved…which was the whole reason I started my search.) I did not score it on a rubric and conclude that it was optimal (the house is too big, and old enough that I will likely never finish renovating and repairing.) At some point it just started being the place that was in my mind when I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular — when I was driving somewhere else, or making coffee, or half-asleep. The image that kept arriving. I eventually got curious enough about that to pay attention to what it might be telling me.

It turned out it was telling me something accurate. Not everything — there were things I had to learn about what it actually costs to live in a 257 year old house, what it gives you in exchange, what you sacrifice. All of that had to be worked through. But the initial pull was pointing at something real.

That’s what I think the pull is doing when it does this to you. Not making the decision for you. Just pointing. Saying: this one. Look at this one more carefully.

The place already knows something. You might as well hear what it has to say.

If you’re in this particular kind of search — the one where the research is done but something keeps pulling back toward one place — I’m always happy to talk through what that might mean. Not to tell you whether to trust it, but to help you understand what you’d actually be saying yes to.

Here’s to knowing before you know you know.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Property taxes. Insurance. The seasonal opening and closing, which costs more than it should and takes more coordination than it used to. Heat through the winter, or the cost of winterizing if you don’t. The dock in and out. The lawn care. The property manager you found after the pipe froze that one January when nobody was around to catch it.

Add it up. Most people have done this. The number is real and they know it.

Here’s the calculation most people haven’t sat with as carefully: how many weeks were you actually there last year? And what might that mean for who you’re becoming?

Not the weeks you said in March you would be spending there this summer. Not the long weekend in May you had to cancel, or the Columbus Day stretch that got compressed into two nights because something came up. The weeks you were actually there, feet on the trail, boat ready at the dock, coffee going, nowhere else to be.

For most people in this category, that number is somewhere between three and four weeks. Often less. Occasionally more, but not by much.

That’s the financial math. Twelve months of carrying costs divided by three to four weeks of actual use. Most people, when they do it honestly, are a little surprised. Not by the costs themselves. By the ratio.

But that’s not the calculation I’ve been thinking about.

This past winter I talked to more second home owners than usual who were quietly turning something over. Not panicking. Not grieving. Just... thinking out loud. A handful of them said some version of the same thing: this might be the year.

What strikes me now, as I continue to stay in conversation with some of them, is that none of them have made it up yet this season.

I’m not saying they aren’t coming. But it was 77 degrees on the Big Lake yesterday. Gorgeous. The kind of day that in a normal year has the docks full and the boat launches backed up. Traffic was thin.

I noticed it. I’m not drawing conclusions. I’m just saying I noticed it.

The second kind of calculation is harder to do, and it doesn’t have a clean number at the end.

It sounds like this: What does it mean to us to be ‘lake people?’

Because that’s what a second home is, after a certain point. It’s not just a property. It’s an identity. We go up every summer. We’re lake people. The kids grew up in that cove. It becomes part of how you introduce yourself at dinner parties, part of the story you tell about your family, part of what you picture when you imagine a good life.

And that’s not nothing. That identity is real and it was earned. The summers that built it were real. And it never goes away, it will always be part of the largeness that is your story.

The harder question — the one that’s quieter and more private than any conversation about carrying costs — is whether that identity is still the most authentic expression of you. Whether the person who fell in love with this place, who needed what it offered, who was genuinely happiest on that dock on a Tuesday morning in June... whether that’s still the truest expression of you.

Or whether you’ve become someone else a little. Someone who loves October in Madrid and has been talking about a winter in New Mexico for three years now. Someone whose kids are grown and making their own summer stories somewhere else. Someone who still loves the idea of the lake house more reliably than they love the lake house.

There’s no shame in that. People change. That’s the whole point of a life.

You can be lake people for twenty years and then become something else entirely. Island people. Mountain people. People who finally take the trip they’ve been deferring since the kids were small because there was always the house to open, the dock to put in, the summer to organize around this special place.

The math I’m describing isn’t about whether you can afford to keep it. It’s about whether keeping it is still the best expression of the life you’re actively building right now.

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That’s the calculation most people haven’t done out loud yet.

They’ve done the financial math. They know the number. They’ve probably justified it a dozen different ways, and some of those justifications are valid. The place matters. The memories are real. The potential is always there.

But the life math is different. And it’s usually the one that tips the scale.

In my experience, the people who are genuinely at peace with their second home — who aren’t lying awake doing quiet arithmetic — have done both. They know what it costs and they know what it gives them, and the trade still makes sense. Not on paper. In their actual life.

The people who are quietly turning something over usually know which calculation they haven’t finished yet.

If you’re in that place — not decided, not ready, just turning it over — I’m not here to tell you what the answer is. I don’t know your summers. I don’t know what the lake means to your family or what else is calling.

But if it would help to think it through with someone who knows this market, knows what buyers in your category are actually looking for, and won’t push you toward any particular outcome: that conversation is easy to start. It doesn’t commit you to anything.

Sometimes it just helps to say the thing out loud to someone who isn’t in your family.

Here’s to knowing what your life is actually asking for.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Not in a bad way. In the way that means it’s yours now. The lake you drive past every single morning on the way to wherever you’re going — you still notice it, but the noticing has changed. It’s less gasp and more exhale. Mostly. There are still mornings I round a bend I’ve rounded a hundred times and lose a second to it anyway. The mountains in the background of your commute become, simply, the mountains. Present tense. Permanent fixture. Yours. But they’re still the mountains.

I’m in my third summer here as a year-round resident. And I’ve been thinking about what I would tell the version of myself from 4 years ago back in Boston about our life now. She was sitting in traffic on the way in from the suburbs, knowing there was an hour back out at the other end. Two hours a day, just gone. And she wouldn’t recognize this life or this version of us…but it’s pretty great.

I lived in cities for most of my adult life. Toronto. Santiago. Philadelphia. Boston (well, Somerville and Arlington) for fifteen years. I genuinely thought I was a city person. The occasional camping weekend mostly confirmed it — I’d come home grateful for concrete and coffee shops and the particular comfort of knowing that if I needed anything at 10pm, I could get it.

What I didn’t do, almost ever, was go to the museums or the performances or the restaurants I was supposedly staying for. Like a lot of people I know, I lived in proximity to interesting things and spent most of my time commuting to and from work, thinking about getting out of town.

We vacationed in New Hampshire. A week on a lake somewhere, a long weekend at Loon in the winter, camping in the Whites if we were feeling ambitious. And every single time, somewhere between the drive in and the drive out, I’d have the thought: what would it be like to just live here? Then I’d dismiss it as impractical and merge back onto 93 south.

COVID didn’t make me move. But it asked a question I couldn’t un-hear. Why am I here? Expensive, loud, far from anything I actually want on a Tuesday afternoon. I was working from home in a city that had stopped offering most of what I’d stayed for. The what-if feeling didn’t go away when things opened back up. It just got quieter and more settled, the way the really important feelings do.

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When I finally decided to go, I went all in. That’s how I’m built.

My middle child, the one most enthusiastic about long car rides (and the one most likely to have opinions), and I spent weekends hitting open houses across an absurdly wide search radius. Eastern Vermont. Southern Maine. Pretty much all of New Hampshire. We kept coming back to the Lakes Region. It felt like home before we had any business calling it that. Beautiful and still accessible — coast in an hour, Portland or Portsmouth if you need a city fix, Logan in ninety minutes if you have to fly somewhere. When I found the house, I knew. It was the land, mostly. The sense that this could belong to my kids someday too, if they wanted it. If they adjusted from city kids to something harder to name.

We moved in late March. I thought that was late enough to miss winter.

The biggest snowstorm in a decade hit the following week. We lost power for five days.

The first two days were genuinely fun. We made pancakes on the 1930s wood-burning cookstove I had privately thought of as a charming decorative feature. We boiled water for tea on it. We played cards by the fireplace and took candles to our bedrooms and felt like pioneers. And we learned that when you lose power on a well, you lose water. We melted snow. It was instructive.

What I didn’t expect was the neighbors. People came by to check on us. Just showed up, introduced themselves, offered things. By the time the power came back on, we knew more people on our road than I’d known in fifteen years in Arlington. We felt, in some basic and important way, like we could do this. Like we had already done something.

Other things I got wrong: that food would be findable after 8pm. That GPS routing is more of a suggestion than a promise, and that access roads do technically connect two points…but in way that means my Chevy Equinox may never be the same. That everyone in town would know which house I’d bought, who had lived there for the last 100 years, had walked through during the open house out of curiosity, and had a ghost story to share about the house or the land.

Here’s what a Tuesday looks like now.

I get up early because the dogs need to go out and the chickens need feeding and there are always dishes and laundry because life is fuller now, in the way that actually feels good rather than just depleting. The kids catch the bus. I head out to wherever I’m headed — yoga class I actually attend instead of theoretically intend to, a showing, a listing appointment, a delivery for Lakes and Peaks Provisions Co. (my other small business, I contain multitudes y’all) — and I drive past at least one lake on the way. Usually more. I get peekaboo views of peaks and farms and stone walls and things that make me lose a few seconds of attention every time, even now.

I stop for coffee at one of the spots I’ve carefully mapped along various routes. I make sure I’m not on the phone through the dead zones I’ve also memorized.

I might meet my writers group, or book club, or the knitting circle that turned out to be a real thing and not just a fantasy. I might meet a friend for a drink on someone’s deck in the afternoon, which is a thing people do here, because they’re neighbors in the actual sense of the word. Not people you recognize from the school pickup line. People who have fed your animals and let you sell their Mom’s house and shoveled your driveway and sat with you through things.

Twenty minutes to water. Forty to a grocery store when I need one, which is less often than I used to. One lake minimum, every single day, just in the course of getting somewhere.

I traded a cubicle for a job that doesn’t end at 5pm, or really ever. I also traded a commute that stole two hours a day for a drive that gives something back every single time I take it.

I know what you’re doing. Half-working, half-looking at listings on some real estate site, thinking about whether this is a real idea or just a feeling you have when you’re tired.

Here’s what I’d tell you: it’s probably both, and that’s fine. The feeling doesn’t mean you’re ready. But the fact that it keeps coming back means it’s worth taking seriously.

What I couldn’t have known from the outside is that the things I thought I’d miss are mostly things I wasn’t actually taking advantage of, anyway. And the things I have now — the specific quality of a Tuesday in a place that feels more like mine every day, the friends who show up, the land, the light, the particular exhale of driving past the same lake every morning and knowing it’s home — those weren’t in any listing description I ever read.

You don’t know what your version of this looks like until you’re in it. But you can start figuring out what questions to ask.

If you’re somewhere between “I wonder” and “I’m actually thinking about this,” that’s exactly where most good conversations start.

I’m always happy to have one.

Here’s to the places that stop surprising you just enough to become home.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

What happens if nothing changes?

Not what do you want. Not what are you looking for. What happens to your life if it stays exactly as it is?

Some people answer quickly. Some get quiet in a way that tells me more than the quick answers do.

I ask it because I know what my own answer was, even if I didn’t have the words for it at the time and if no one posed that exact question.

Before I moved up here, my life was perfectly fine. Metro Boston. A cubicle. Two hours a day on the T or crawling up and back a congested highway, depending on whether the universe felt like being fair that morning. My kids were fine. They went to good schools. After school they popped into CVS for Monsters and chips and mostly hung out on their phones with friends. Weekends happened. Seasons changed. Weather was a novelty. Nothing was terrible.

Fine is its own kind of stuck.

If someone had asked me then what would happen if nothing changed, I think I might have gotten small and quiet and known, somewhere underneath the perfectly fine surface of things, that my life would be less vibrant. Less full of surprise and beauty and whimsy. Less like mine.

I didn’t know that’s what I was missing. I just knew, when I got quiet enough to feel it, that the answer to the question wasn’t comfortable.

My commute now takes me over and around green hills next to lakes that each have their own personality, that shift with the wind and the sky and the hour of the day in ways I’m don’t think I’ll ever be done noticing. Last week my eldest asked me to pull over so he could get out and photograph the view with his phone. The same kid who used to look at his phone to avoid views.

On the odd evening we’re all home, we have neighbors over to sit around the fire in the backyard and watch the chickens decide when it’s time to roost. Dogs the size of small ponies guard the flock and leave drifts of fur on the stairs of the rambling farmhouse we’re gradually, imperfectly restoring. It’s a lot. It’s also exactly what I wanted, even though I couldn’t have named it before I had it.

I’m going into year three.

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Year one was about learning what I didn’t know I didn’t know. That wells need electricity to give you water, which you discover at the least convenient possible moment. That access roads mean do not drive on these roads, not that they’re a scenic shortcut worth trying. That you can’t get a decent drink on a Tuesday night, but your neighbor might brew his own beer in his garage. (Shout out to Frost Heave Brewery in Brookfield.)

Year one is humbling in the best way. You arrive thinking you’ve done your research and the place politely corrects you.

Year two was something else entirely. Year two was falling in love. Not with the landscape, though that too. With the people. With the particular texture of friendships that form when your neighbors are also your infrastructure. People who will go let your dogs out in the middle of a workday without being asked. Who show you how to fire the generator the first time the power goes out and you’re standing there in the dark feeling like an idiot. Who come over for driveway beers on a Thursday and tell stories about their kids and the ghosts in the old houses and how you know when you’re ready to add goats to a homestead. (Short answer: you’re never ready, just go for it) These are not acquaintances. These are people who know the shape of your life.

I didn’t have that in the same way before. Not because Boston doesn’t have good people in it. Because in a certain kind of life, you can go a long time without needing anyone.

Year three is still unfolding.

But I caught something the other day that felt like a marker. I was talking to someone about getting fuel on Winnipesaukee and I said Shep’s. It’s been Goodhue for a beat now. The person I was talking to knew exactly what I meant. We didn’t have to stop and explain anything.

There are still things that I need explained, but now I know where my cell phone will drop calls; what roads don’t get plowed so well and should be avoided the morning of a snow storm; who to call for tree work, or a plumbing emergency, or for a gut check on a repair quote; which of my neighbors have their own eggs in excess and which would appreciate a dozen left on the stoop every so often.

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When buyers come to me, they usually arrive with criteria and lists like we’re on an HGTV show where we’ll have to choose one of three properties that all magically fit the list and are under budget. Waterfront or water access. Three bedrooms minimum. Proximity to a good school or a route to a decent airport or the mountain they’ve been skiing for twenty years. The lists are useful. They’re also almost never the real thing.

The real thing is usually somewhere in the answer to the question I ask first.

What happens if your life stays exactly as it is?

I’m not asking anyone to blow it up. I’m not suggesting that fine isn’t sometimes genuinely fine. Some people answer the question and feel settled and like if it doesn’t work out right now, it wasn’t meant to be. That’s useful information too.

But the people who come up here and stay, the ones who make it through year one’s corrections and year two’s deepening and into whatever year three quietly hands them, they usually knew something when they got quiet. They felt it before they could say it. The question just gave it a shape.

I can’t tell you what your answer is. I can tell you that the question is worth sitting with, and that I’ve never regretted asking it of myself or of others.

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

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

P.S. I built a quiz if you’re wondering how this version of life would fit you. Try it out!

The first week and a half: the lake is finally warm enough to swim in without that particular expression people make when they first go under and their heart seems to stop. The boats are out. The farmers markets have reopened — Laconia on Saturdays, Meredith on Tuesdays, Wolfeboro on Thursdays. The trails smell like something finished blooming and something else might be just beginning. It’s the most iconic moment of the year here: summer has arrived, the crowds have too, and the mornings are so clear and long that driving anywhere before 8 a.m. feels like having this place all to yourself.

And then: June 13th.

Bike Week runs June 13–21, and if you haven’t been here for it, here’s what you need to know. The region transforms. Motorcyles on every road, every parking lot, outside every diner and pub. The sound of engines carries across the lake. Weirs Beach becomes a different world for those nine days — alive and loud and full of people who have been looking forward to this get together all year. It’s the nation’s oldest motorcycle rally; New Orleans has Mardi Gras, NYC has the Thanksgiving Day Parade, Boston has St. Patrick’s Day (Week), and we have Bike Week.

We’re not saying hide. We’re saying: know what week it is before you make plans. If you want to eat on the western shore without waiting an hour, plan around it. If you’re a first-timer and curious about what Bike Week actually looks like from inside the region, go see. The Gunstock Annual Hill Climb on June 17th is worth your morning. The energy that week is something else.

And then, around the 22nd, it quiets back down. The last week of June is like the breath between two sentences: Bike Week behind us, Independence Day still ahead. Something to be said for holding that breath for a beat.

Here’s a round up of non-Bike-Week things to do across the month.

Farm & Nature

Sourdough Bread at Prescott Farm Environmental Education Center, Laconia. June 6. Prescott Farm runs hands-on programming that rarely disappoints. A sourdough workshop in early June, before the season gets truly busy, fits well. Bread not your thing? They have a full slate of everything from cheesemaking to wayfinding. Here’s the full summer adult ed program: https://prescottfarm.org/service/public-programs/for-adults/

Forest Health Hike at Sheridan Woods, Red Hill Conservation Area. June 11. Red Hill has some of the best views in the region. This is a guided hike through the conservation area with a focus on forest health — the kind of morning that reminds you why you chose this place.

Children’s Day at NH Farm Museum, Milton. June 20, 10 a.m.–4 p.m. Games from another era, farm animals, the full outdoor-in-summer spirit. Worth the short drive out to Milton.

Stories on the Farm, NH Farm Museum, Milton. June 26. The Farm Museum’s programming is consistently good and under=attended. Pairs well with a farm stand stop on the way home.

Events & Gatherings

Night at the Museum — Up to Camp, NH Boat Museum, Moultonborough. June 5. The Boat Museum does this event well. Full details at nhbm.org.

Cars and Coffee, Ciardi’s Cider Barn, Moultonborough. June 6. A morning gathering for car people, at one of the more scenic spots to spend a Saturday before the day heats up.

Annual Officer Kainen M. Flynn Memorial Fishing Derby and Belknap County Sportsmen’s Association Fishing Derby, both at Gunstock, Gilford. June 6 and 7. Back-to-back fishing derbies to open the month. If you’re a fishing household, this is probably an annual gig for you.

Shaker Village Barn Dance, Canterbury Shaker Village. June 18, 7:30–10 p.m. The Shaker Village does a barn dance right. Live music, actual dancing, the historical setting making the whole thing feel earned rather than performed. (603-783-9511.)

Greater Meredith Program Street Dance, Meredith Main Street. June 26. Main Street, a summer evening, dancing. Nothing further need be said. I’ll be there, come find me!

Antique & Vintage Fair on the Green, Wolfeboro Historical Society. June 27. Wolfeboro is a good town for this kind of browsing, and the setting is right.

Community Reading: Frederick Douglass’ “What to the Slave is your Fourth of July?”, Canterbury Shaker Village. June 27. One week before Independence Day, one of the most important speeches in American history, and now, read aloud in community.

Theatre & Music

Barnstormers Theatre, Tamworth, has a full June going. The Summer Soiree is June 20, and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels — The Musical opens June 25 and runs through July 4. Tamworth is a destination drive; the theatre makes it worth it. barnstormers.org.

Interlakes Theatre, Meredith: Great Balls of Fire, June 27–28. Interlakes consistently punches above its size.

The Colonial Theatre, Laconia: Hugo — The Ultimate Journey Tribute, June 19; 1776 The Musical in Concert, June 27. Two very different nights in the same good room. coloniallaconia.com.

Feel the Barn Music, Chocorua: Bruce Marshall Group, June 14; Rhett Miller, June 21; Scott Hambridge, June 28. Three consecutive weekends at one of the region’s best small outdoor venues. Food available at 6 p.m.; music follows. thefarmstand.net.

One Night in Memphis, Flying Monkey, Plymouth. June 5. flyingmonkeynh.com.

Shades of Bublé, Wolfeboro Friends of Music, Anderson Hall at Brewster Academy. June 13, 7–9 p.m. wolfeborofriendsofmusic.org.

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History & Lectures (A Particularly Good Month)

June turns out to be one of the better months for the kind of history talk that makes you understand where you’re actually living.

The Wright Museum of WWII, Wolfeboro, runs lectures every Tuesday: Ronald Janowski, Waking the Sleeping Giant (June 2); Stephen Harding, G.I. G-Men (June 9); Doug Most, Launching Liberty (June 23); Christine Kuehn, Family of Spies (June 30). Four consecutive weeks for anyone who finds their way in. wrightmuseum.org.

Castle in the Clouds: Volcanoes and Cellar Holes; the History of Ossipee Park, June 4, 10 a.m.–noon. If you’ve ever driven past the Ossipee Range and wondered about its geology and history, this is your morning. Pre-registration required at castleintheclouds.org.

Moultonborough Public Library runs a strong program this month: Mass Extinctions and the Ongoing Struggle for Life on Earth (June 2); Stories from the Revolutionary War (June 9); Castle in the Clouds and the Servants of Lucknow (June 17), which pairs well with visiting the estate.

Clark Museum Barn, Wolfeboro: Josiah Bartlett, Apothecary (June 2); Songs of Old New Hampshire (June 8). The Clark Museum rewards returning visitors.

Redcoats and Rebels: NH and the American Revolution, Old Town Hall, Gilmanton Iron Works. June 26. Pre-July 4th, a look at what actually happened here. Gilmanton Iron Works is worth the drive just to see the village and the beautiful farms that surround it.

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On the Water

The NH Boat Museum, Moultonborough, expands to full summer hours starting June 16: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; Sunday, noon–4 p.m. New exhibits on waterskiing and propulsion this season. Their On Water Instruction program through Goodhue Boat Company runs June 16, 23, and 30 — full days on the water for anyone who wants to actually learn something. Pre-registration at nhbm.org or 603-569-4554.

Junior Skippers Lake Discovery Day, NH Boat Museum. June 25. Worth knowing if you have kids drawn to the water.

Castle in the Clouds guided hikes on June 11, 13, 20, and 25. The trails are in full summer condition; the views are open; mountain laurel will be at or near peak for the early dates. Pre-registration at castleintheclouds.org.

Squam Lakes Natural Science Center runs lake cruises throughout the month and begins week-long summer nature camps June 22 for kids ages 5–13. nhnature.org.

Muscle Building Bittersweet Pull at C.C. Browne Woods, Chocorua. June 16. Conservation volunteers pulling invasive bittersweet from the forest. Bring gloves. It matters more than it sounds.

Arts & Craft

Friday Painters en Plein Air Guest Artists Show, ArtWorks CCAC, Chocorua. Through June 29, Thursday–Monday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Opening reception June 5, 5–7 p.m. A full month of plein air work in and around Chocorua. chocoruaartworks.com.

Lucknow Garden Tour, Castle in the Clouds. June 6. The gardens at the estate are worth a morning on their own; this is the organized version. Pre-registration at castleintheclouds.org.

An Evening with NHBM Member Artists’ Reception, NH Boat Museum. June 11. Art made by people who love boats and water and the particular light of this region.

Makers Mill, Wolfeboro, runs a full month of workshops: Berry Basket Weaving (June 7), Sewing 101 (June 10), Beginner Needle Felting (June 13), Sewing 102 (June 20), Snappy Bag (June 24), and a Repair Cafe on June 28. Makers Mill is exactly the kind of place that makes a town feel like a community rather than just a geography. makersmillnh.org.

Community Arts Festival, Castle in the Clouds. June 27.

Watercolor Workshop, Castle in the Clouds. June 28. Pre-register at castleintheclouds.org.

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Weekly Regulars Worth Knowing

The farmers markets are back. Laconia Farmers Market, East Beacon Street, Saturdays, 8:30 a.m.–noon. Wolfeboro Area Farmers Market, The Nick, Thursdays, 12:30–4:30 p.m. Meredith Area Farmers Market, Tuesdays.

Acoustic Open Mic Night at the Hayloft, Hobbs Tavern, West Ossipee. Wednesdays, 7–9 p.m. Still running, still worth it.

People who are thinking about this place from somewhere else — who follow this newsletter because they’re doing the slow research of figuring out whether the Lakes Region could be their place — sometimes ask us what the ideal month to visit would be.

June is a real answer to that question.

Not the postcard version. The real one. The one where you drive in on a quiet Tuesday morning before Bike Week starts and the lake is right there and the light is that particular early-summer quality and you think: oh. This is what they mean.

If you want to talk through what the different seasons actually feel like here — what you’d be choosing and what you’d be trading — I’m always happy to have that conversation. Even if you’re a year or more away from being ready to act on any of it.

Here’s to the lake, fully awake.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

The brochures skip Spring entirely.

They go straight from ice-out — the dramatic image of open water, the symbolic exhale — to July. The sparkle of Winnipesaukee on a perfect afternoon. The packed marina at Weirs Beach. The painted houses in Alton Bay. The sunsets on Great East Lake. The version of here that photographs well and travels far and makes people in their city apartments close their laptops and say we should really do something about that.

Spring here doesn’t photograph well. Not in the way that’s useful for a brochure or your Insta feed. It’s overcast more than it’s clear. It’s cold when it should be warming. The lilacs bloom and then it rains for four days straight and you wonder if they’ll survive it, and they do, but that is not the story anyone is telling. The black flies arrive right on schedule. The dirt roads are a mess until they aren’t. Mud season technically ends in April but mud doesn’t always get the memo. Yesterday I made it a mile down a dirt road I’ve taken dozens of times before giving up and turning around lest I get stuck in the mire.

And yet.

May is the month that belongs to the people who chose this place honestly. Not for its best light, not for its July self, but for what it actually is.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: the seasons here are teachers. Spring is the most particular one. It doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It doesn’t bathe you in sun and warmth and greens and blues. It does what it does — cold mornings that have no business being cold in the third week of May, rain that settles in for a Tuesday and doesn’t leave until Friday, windows where the sun comes out hard and brilliant and the lake goes silver-blue and you think there it is, before the clouds close back in.

What spring asks of you is a kind of faith. Not in the optimistic, inspirational-poster sense. Just the plain willingness to believe it’s happening even when the weather is doing its best to suggest otherwise.

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Here’s what May gives back, if you’re paying attention.

The peepers. If you’ve never heard the peepers come up in full voice on a warm night — and warm here in early May means somewhere in the 50s, the kind of night that warrants a sweatshirt — you haven’t fully understood this place yet. It’s not quiet. It’s the opposite of quiet. It’s the sound of ten thousand small creatures announcing that winter is over, whether the weather cooperates or not. It arrives before the leaves are fully out and before the tourists arrive and it’s entirely, specifically ours.

The light in the mornings. Before the green canopy fills in, the light comes through differently. It’s the light of a place still waking up, still showing its bones. You can see sightlines through the woods that will close off entirely by June. If you’ve ever pulled into a scenic view parking lot and thought, “what view?” that one was designed for May and the locals. The mountains look different. Cleaner. The lake reflects things it won’t reflect once the leaves are thick. There’s a two-week window, maybe three, where you see the landscape the way it looked before anyone built on it, or close enough.

The restaurants that just reopened. The ones that went to winter hours in November and are finally back, or back to full schedule, or trying something new with the spring menu before the summer pace sets in. There’s something good about being in a dining room that’s not yet at capacity, where the kitchen is still finding its rhythm, where the owner comes out to the floor because they have time to. It’s a version of this place most summer visitors will never see.

The lake before it’s busy. This is the one that’s hardest to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it. Winnipesaukee on a quiet May morning is a different body of water than it is on a Saturday in August. Not better and not worse. Different in a way that matters. You can hear your own paddle. A loon surfaces thirty feet off the kayak and looks at you with that particular loon expression — mild indignation, a little regal — and then dives. You could have been anyone. You could have been no one. The lake doesn’t care. It’s doing what it does, whether you witness it or not.

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What’s the key thing to know about spring in the Lakes Region? It is not a season you hold onto, it’s one you pass through. It knows what comes next. It’s been doing this long enough.

This past weekend was Memorial Day. Cold, rainy, the kind of weather that makes you wonder if the calendar made a clerical error. Sunday morning you’d have been forgiven for thinking nothing was open and no one was coming.

And then the sun came out for a few hours Monday afternoon.

The boat traffic on Winnipesaukee was the heaviest I’ve seen yet, and nothing like whats to come. Boats the way you count them in May is nothing like how you count them in July. In a month it will be wakes crossing wakes. The whole spread of the lake doing what the whole spread of the lake does.

This morning, I circled the same block in Wolfeboro three times looking for a parking spot and finally found one. The town was alive the way it gets before it’s officially alive — half the people in hoodies and pants and half in sundresses and shorts and flip flops, contractors finishing their spring work, the harbor waiting to be full.

Last night my oldest and I passed through and saw the telltale signal that locals season is behind us: twenty people in line outside Bailey’s Bubbles at 7:30 pm, waiting for ice cream in fleeces and light jackets, a few of them still holding umbrellas from earlier in the day. Because it was Memorial Day weekend and that is what you do.

Spring is handing over the baton.

Not dramatically. Not in the clean, ceremonial way a brochure might suggest. In the way things actually transition here: while it is still cold, while there is still mud on a few back roads, while the black flies are still making their presence known on the shaded trails and sneaking into your house when someone holds a door open for a fraction of a second. Summer doesn’t wait for spring to finish here. Spring doesn’t wait for permission to let go. They overlap for a while, the way the seasons always do here, and now, day by day, the math will start to shift.

Spring is the season most worth understanding, I think. Not because it’s the hardest (that’s a first winter, and that’s its own conversation). But because it’s the most honest.

It will not perform for you. It will not produce a perfect day on request. It will give you exactly what it has, which some weeks is mud and cold and the stubborn refusal to be warm, and some weeks is morning light through bare maples and loon calls and coffee on the dock when the water is still and the air smells like something waking up.

Both are what you sign up for if you choose to call this place home.

Both are worth it.

Here’s to May. The season before the season. The one the brochures skip and the locals keep for ourselves, mostly.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

Here’s mine.

Keys to the Lakes serves buyers and sellers in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region. I am legally permitted, as an agent in this state and by my brokerage (Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Verani Realty) in practice, to represent both a buyer and a seller in the same transaction. I have never done so. And, I don’t have any intention of doing so in the future.

I refer out any lead that would put me in a position where I can’t negotiate fully and without reservation on behalf of my client. If I’m listing a property and an unrepresented buyer appears, that buyer gets referred to another agent. If I’m working with a buyer and they want to offer on a property where I have a conflict, I facilitate and step back from negotiation entirely.

This probably costs me transactions, sure. And, it nets me less money on some. I think it’s the only way to do the job honestly.

The reason is simple: I can only negotiate in the best interests of one client at a time. Full stop.

What negotiation actually is

People often think negotiation is about price. It’s not only about price. It’s about the whole transfer of a property, and there are a lot of levers in that transfer.

Price, yes. But also timing. Inspection terms. What repairs are included and what aren’t. Whether there’s a credit at closing instead of a repair. Whether seller financing makes the deal work when conventional financing doesn’t. Whether a longer closing timeline matters more to a seller than the number at the top of the offer. Whether you just get cold feet and decide you don’t want to buy or sell after all.

My job is to help you see all of those levers clearly, understand what each one means for your specific situation, and make informed choices about how to use them. I bring process knowledge and strategic insight. I stay on my side of the ledger. The decisions are yours.

That last part is non-negotiable for me. I will absolutely tell you what I think will make an offer stronger, where I believe there’s room to push, and what concessions I’d expect to come back. I’ll tell you what I know, what I believe to be true, and what my read is on the psychology of the deal at that particular moment. And then I create space for questions, for debate, for thinking. I never rush.

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What this looks like in practice

Keys to the Lakes listed a property last year for a seller who had been in the home only a short time, but had put significant work into it. Upgrades that justified a price well above what the timeline might have suggested. The seller knew what the home was worth. That number wasn’t moving.

What was flexible was time. The seller was downsizing to live with family, and the timeline for that transition had room in it. No pressure to close by a specific date. No financial urgency driving a concession on price.

My job in that negotiation was to hold the line on the one thing that mattered and stay patient on everything else. The home sat for about a month. The first people who walked through it were also the people who eventually bought it. They needed time to shop the market, see what else was available, and come to the conclusion the seller already knew: the price was right. I didn’t chase them. I didn’t blink on price. I kept the conversation open on timing and terms, and I waited.

When they came back, they came back ready.

Earlier this year, Keys to the Lake worked with buyers purchasing a waterfront property entirely remotely. They’d seen it by video walkthrough only. They were smart, thorough people who had done their research. They trusted KTL enough to delegate the due diligence meeting with the town entirely to us. KTL brought their renovation plans, asked the questions they needed answered about what improvements would be permissible on the lot, and relayed back what was learned. Not a decision meeting. An informational meeting.

It still takes a significant amount of trust to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something you’ve never walked through in person. I don’t take that lightly.

Negotiations on that deal stretched across multiple weeks. That was okay. Everyone involved understood the risks of not settling quickly, and everyone agreed that getting it right mattered more than getting it done fast.

What kept that process from unraveling wasn’t confidence or pressure or any particular tactical move. It was communication. Clear, consistent, active communication. Every point in the negotiation included an honest explanation of where things stood, what the options were, and what the read was on the situation. Every decision point was returned to the clients with enough information to make a real choice, not just to ratify what I thought they should do.

They bought the property. They have significant renovation plans. And they moved up from Florida just in time for the nice weather this week.

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Why I’m telling you this

If you’re a buyer or seller doing research on agents in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, you’re probably comparing a lot of people who sound similar on the surface. Responsive. Experienced. Knowledgeable about the market.

I don’t know how to shortcut the process of figuring out who you can actually trust. But I do think you should be able to ask your agent, directly, what their negotiation philosophy is. What they do when a deal gets complicated. Whether they represent both sides. How they handle a situation where the fastest path to closing isn’t the best path for you.

Those are reasonable questions. I think you deserve clear answers before you sign anything.

If you’re thinking about buying or selling in the Lakes Region and you want to understand how I work before you decide whether I’m the right fit, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I’m committed to. No pressure. Just honest information.

Here’s to getting it right over getting it done fast.

🧭 Jenn

Keys to the Lakes

The greens are new and the light hasn’t settled into summer yet. You’ve probably seen it this week. The way sun moves through the woods in the morning, catching leaves that are still translucent — not the heavy, closed green of July, but something lighter. Almost yellow. The contrast between light and shadow at the tree line. The lawn a particular shade. The flowering trees doing their brief, specific thing. The path through the woods dappled and soft, looking exactly like the version of itself people think of when someone says “path through the woods.”

On a lakefront property, the water is part of it. The light glints in July and you raise your hands to block the glare. In May and early June, it plays on the surface, glimmering, enticing you onto water still so cold that even dangling a hand or a foot is shocking. That contrast — the beauty of it against the cold of it, the way it looks like an invitation and then delivers a gasp — is not something a July photograph evokes. And on properties without water, the same argument holds in the woods, on the deck, in the garden beds just turning. The whole property is doing something right now that it won’t do the same way again for a whole year.

It’s worth seeing right now, with that green and that light and that emotion.

Maybe you’ve already made the decision. Not out loud, not officially. But somewhere over the winter it settled. You know you’re going to sell. And you want one more July first. One more Columbus Day weekend, one more season of the thing you’ve loved.

That’s exactly right. Take it.

But while you’re here opening the house this spring, in the weeks before the season fills in — call an agent. Get the photographs.

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Here’s why.

Fall listings in the Lakes Region have a real argument behind them. The summer crowd has thinned. The buyers still shopping in October and November are serious. The competition is lower. In our experience, that combination has advantages, and for the right property in the right condition, it’s a strong window.

But those buyers are still human. They still dream in images. The listing that stops someone mid-scroll on a gray November evening was photographed when the light was doing something worth capturing. The image that makes a buyer in Connecticut set down their coffee and say we need to call about this one — that image exists right now, in the particular quality of light that lives in late May and early June and no other time in quite the same way.

If you list in October without it, you’re asking buyers to imagine what summer here feels like. Some of them can. Most of them are better helped by seeing it.

There’s another version of this too. Some properties are beautiful in more than one season. The birch trees in October. The snow on the dock in January. The particular quality of a screened porch in August rain. Documenting a place across multiple seasons, if the timeline allows, tells the story of a life lived there fully — not just the postcard version of it. That’s a different kind of listing, and it earns a different kind of attention.

But it starts with not missing this window.

The photographs are not a large expense. They are not a commitment. If you change your mind and don’t sell, you have professional images of your property in its best light, and nothing is lost. If you list in the fall, you have the images that deliver summer to a buyer reading listings in the dark.

Either way, we’ve spent one afternoon with a camera crew and you’ve given yourself options.

The season you’re in right now is the one that makes people fall in love with a place from six hundred miles away. You already fell in love with it, probably in a season a lot like this one. The photographs are just the chance for someone else to do the same.

Enjoy your summer. We mean that. But make the call first.

Here’s to the season that shows you everything.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

We’ve had a cold, damp spring. But this weekend, the light is doing that thing it does in May, or July, or early October, where it angles across the water at a height that makes you feel like you’ve stepped into something that was made specifically for you. The mountains are there. The air smells like pine and cold water even when the temperature is warm(ish). Someone’s boat is moving slow across the far side of the lake, and the wake is catching the sun in a way that doesn’t feel real.

You’ve been thinking about this for a while. And this weekend, you’re thinking about it more concretely.

We want to talk to you about that. Not to talk you into anything. Not to talk you out of anything either. But because there’s a conversation worth having before you get too far down the road, and it’s not one most people have with you early enough.

Here it is: the Lakes Region isn’t a summer. It’s a year. And whether that year, in its entirety, is right for you is the actual question.

What You’re Seeing Right Now Is Real

We want to be clear about that first, because we’re not about to spend this entire piece warning you away from something we love. What you’re feeling this weekend is not a trick. The lake is that beautiful. The pace does shift when you cross the state line. The quality of life available here genuinely is what it looks like from where you’re standing.

But you’re standing in it on a finally-warm Sunday in May. Maybe you’ve also stood here on a day in July when the sun hung in the sky for what felt like days or during peak foliage when every hillside looks like someone dialed up the saturation. In any case, it’s likely the life you’re imagining is being built on the evidence of one season, maybe two.

The people who thrive here knew how the full year lands before they arrived, or they learned it fast and decided it was worth it anyway. The people who struggle often say some version of the same thing: it wasn’t what I expected. Not the pace. The winter. The quiet. The trade-offs that don’t feel like trade-offs in May or July or October.

So here is what we actually know about the year, all of it, because you deserve to decide with the whole picture.

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Mud Season Is Real and It Will Test You

Late March into April is mud season. Not metaphorical lotuses growing out of mud as personal development. Physical, actual, your-car-is-stuck-and-also-your-driveway-is-impassable mud. The frost comes out of the ground and the unpaved roads become soft and the fields look like they haven’t decided yet whether they will ever green again or not. The snow is gone from most places but it’s still hanging on in the shaded hollows. The peepers are starting at night and the songbirds are making themselves known in the mornings and everything smells like something waking up from a long sleep.

It’s not all unpleasant. Honestly, there’s something we’ve come to love about mud season. It feels honest. The Lakes Region in April is not performing for you.

The people who love it here know how to plan for it. They don’t pretend it isn’t happening. They order a little ahead. They know which shortcuts have to wait for May. They’ve bought unlimited use passes for the car wash.

Summer Is the Best of It. Also the Busiest.

Summer here is what it looks like from the outside. The water is warm enough to swim by July. The farmers markets are running. The days are long in the way that northern summers are long, where it’s still light at 8:30 and you eat dinner on the porch and nobody wants to go inside. The lakes are alive. The trails are open. There is a specific quality to a July morning on the water before the boat traffic starts that we have never found a way to adequately describe to someone who hasn’t felt it. You just have to be there.

But summer is also the season when the region becomes a different place. The roads back up. You stop going to your favorite restaurant because its too crowded and wait is too long. The lakes, especially Winnipesaukee, are busy by the Fourth of July in a way that can surprise people who visited in May and thought they understood what they were getting. If you’re imagining a quiet life on the water, summer will ask you to redefine quiet. The neighbors whose houses were dark all winter are back. The boat launches have lines on weekend mornings. The town you loved in April is now sharing itself with a lot of people who drove up from Massachusetts for the week.

None of this is bad. Some of it is wonderful. But it’s worth knowing that the Lakes Region in summer isn’t a hidden secret. It’s a known quantity, and it acts like one.

The Tuesday in November Test

Here’s the one that matters most.

Imagine a Tuesday in the second week of November. The foliage is completely over. The summer people are gone, their houses dark and buttoned up until Memorial Day. The lake is the color of pewter. It’s getting dark earlier every day. You have nowhere to be and no one is coming over and the wind is doing something unpleasant in the trees, which are naked.

That Tuesday is coming. Every year, it comes.

The question is not whether you can survive it, because you can. The question is whether you can be in that Tuesday and feel, somewhere underneath the brown and the grey and the quiet and the early dark, something that resembles peace. Maybe even something that resembles pleasure.

Not every person can. And that’s not a character flaw. It’s information. Some people are genuinely built for seasons and silence and the particular enforced introspection that comes from living through a northern winter. Some people find out, somewhere around the second February, that they are not, and they needed to find that out.

The people who love it here most have almost all had a version of that Tuesday. They’ve sat in it. And somewhere in it, usually not dramatically, usually just quietly, they realized: I still want to be here. I’m cold and the sun set two hours ago and I have to drive 45 minutes to get decent Indian food, and I still want to be here.

That’s the test. Not the July weekend. The Tuesday in November.

What Winter Actually Is

The darkness is a real thing. By December you’re losing the light before 4:30, and dark in the Lakes Region is different from dark in a city or a suburb. There are no street lights on most roads. If you live lakeside, the reflection off the water on a clear night is extraordinary, the stars are genuinely astonishing, but on an overcast night in January you are in something close to actual darkness when you walk to your car.

You adjust. Almost everyone does. And then something strange happens: you start to like it. The cozy evenings with a couple of close friends. The fireplace that earns its keep. The way a snowstorm that would paralyze a city becomes, up here, just the day being what the day is. You get wood. You get a good plow guy. You learn which neighbors will check on you and which ones you’ll check on.

There is a particular quality of life in winter here that people don’t tell you about because it’s hard to explain. The region empties of those who don’t love winter, mostly, and the people who are left have chosen to be fully here. There’s a shorthand that develops between year-rounders that is different from summer friendships. You’ve been through something together. That matters.

But winter requires preparation, both practical and psychological. You need a plan for when the power goes out, because it will. You need someone who can help if you get stuck. You need, more than anything, to have made peace with the idea that January is not an inconvenience to be survived. It’s part of where you live. It belongs to the year the same way August does.

What the People Who Love It Most Have In Common

We’ve worked with a lot of people who’ve made this move. And the ones who are thriving here, genuinely thriving, not just stopping by for a few years, have something in common that isn’t about personality type or outdoor enthusiasm or how many winters they’ve seen before.

They decided to be here. Not just in July. In all of it.

They went through a hard February, like this past one. Maybe the one where the cold didn’t break for three weeks and the driveway was a sheet of ice and your boiler went out and you had to beg your guy to come by and fix it right away and the isolation felt, for a few days, a little heavier than they expected.

And on the other side of it, they felt glad. Still here. Still glad.

Some of them felt glad in a surprised way, like they’d passed a test they didn’t know they were taking. Some of them had suspected they’d feel that way and were just confirming it. Some of them, honestly, had harder days than they expected, and then spring came and the ice went out and the peepers started and they thought: okay. We’re doing this. Still.

That’s what belonging looks like here. Not a perfect love story. A chosen one. You know what it gives, and what it sometimes takes. You keep choosing it.

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So Where Are You, Actually?

If you’re visiting this weekend and something in this piece is landing in a clarifying way, one direction or another, that’s exactly the right response. This place deserves a real decision, not a vacation-version one. So does your life.

If you’re thinking through whether the full year here is right for you, we put together a field guide that covers what the listing won’t tell you: seasonal rhythms, town personalities, the real cost of year-round life in the Lakes Region.

Here’s to knowing.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

At $750,000, the picture changed. You were getting both a house that was genuinely something and a location that was genuinely somewhere. Still choices, still tradeoffs, not necessarily waterfront. But real.

At the top of the market, the tradeoffs mostly disappear. What replaces them isn’t a better version of the $750K house — it’s something different in kind. Each of these properties is the only one of itself. There is one active listing on Black Cat Island. There is one point lot at Balmoral catching both the sunrise and the sunset. There is one timber frame with a craftsman’s choices in every joint, within walking distance of Center Harbor’s downtown. There is one property on this lake with an approved boathouse permit and 393 feet of frontage attached to it.

That’s what this tier of the market is actually selling. Not luxury as a category. Singular things.

We talked through some of these at our May library talk. Here’s a closer look at four of them.

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26 Myrtle Drive, Moultonborough | $2,399,000 | 3 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms | 2,581 sq ft | Built 1980 | 0.36 acres | 220 feet of waterfront

The thing worth understanding about a point lot is the geometry. A point catches two exposures — sunrise on one side, sunset on the other — not because of any design decision, but because of where it sits in relation to the water. Most waterfront faces one direction. This one faces two.

Two lots were combined to create this position. 220 feet of frontage on Winnipesaukee’s south shore, southwest exposure, Balmoral Association. The association is worth knowing: private roads, private beach, boat launch, club house. A layer of community underneath the private waterfront, which is a different experience than a house at the end of a town road.

The house is a 1980 Contemporary, 2,581 square feet. Three bedrooms, a layout that works without performing grandeur. A grand-fathered permanent dock. A garden-level apartment that functions as a second unit. The structure is honest about its vintage.

You’re not buying the house. You’re buying the point. But the house is nothing to sneeze at.

24 Dew Point Lane, Center Harbor | $6,995,000 | 7 bedrooms, 6 bathrooms | 5,250 sq ft | Built 2006 | 1.12 acres | 152 feet of waterfront

There are properties on Winnipesaukee with more frontage than this one. There are almost none that put you within walking distance of a town.

Timber frame, 2006. Old growth walnut floors, exposed beams throughout, a great room that opens to the water with mountain views on multiple exposures. And then the Barn: a separate structure with three additional bedrooms, a full kitchen, a game room. Not a guest suite or a carriage house. A second household that shares a property line without sharing a roof. The property accommodates 18 people without anyone making do.

152 feet of frontage. Level lot. Deep water access, dock access. A short walk to Center Harbor’s downtown.

Most properties at this price have solved for privacy. This one has solved for both privacy and dual-access to water and town.

104 Hopewell Road, Alton | $7,450,000 | 7 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms | 12,212 sq ft | Built 1998 | 1.92 acres | 393 feet of waterfront

The boathouse permit is worth stopping on.

Permits for boathouses on Lake Winnipesaukee are not simply applied for and granted. The process is difficult, the number of approvals finite, and the permit attached to 104 Hopewell Road transfers with the deed. It cannot be acquired separately after purchase. It is not available at most properties at any price.

393 feet of frontage in Alton — the most of the four properties here. A private sandy beach and stone breakwater. A permanent mahogany dock. A woodland path through mature trees that screens the house from the water and the water from the road.

This house was designed around a specific logic: everyone, simultaneously, without compromise. Seven bedrooms, each with its own bathroom. An accessible suite that was purpose-built rather than retrofitted. A wellness suite with an endless pool, sauna, and gym that operates independently of the lake, which means this property is fully livable in January in a way most waterfront estates are not. Six-car garage.

At $610 per finished square foot, it’s the lowest price-per-foot of the four. The denominator is 12,000 square feet on nearly two acres of Winnipesaukee waterfront with a boathouse permit attached to it.

30 Leopard’s Leap, Meredith | $15,950,000 | 7 bedrooms, 10 bathrooms | 11,080 sq ft | Built 2007 | 8.15 acres | 458 feet of waterfront

Black Cat Island sits in a protected cove on Lake Winnipesaukee. 30 Leopard’s Leap occupies 8.15 acres of it. Gated. Private. 458 feet of shoreline.

What sits on those 8.15 acres beyond the house: a par 3 golf hole. Two spring-fed ponds. A fruit orchard. A natural sandy beach. Two fire pits. Walking trails and cart paths. A heated four-bay garage. A structure the listing calls a toy barn, with a two-bedroom apartment above it.

The main residence is 11,080 square feet: old growth walnut floors, mahogany walls and doors. A chef’s kitchen with a walk-in pantry. Two dining rooms. Two living rooms. A custom wine cellar. A billiard room with a bar. A U-shaped deepwater dock sized for multiple boats and jet skis.

At $15.95 million, this is not just the current edge of the Lakes Region market. If it closes at asking price, it becomes the highest sale in the history of Lake Winnipesaukee — beating Spindle Point's $14 million record from 2023 by $1.95 million. That's what someone is asking the next buyer to believe is worth owning.

The island creates its own conditions. The cove has its own weather. The gate means the nearest neighbor isn’t visible. A golf hole, two ponds, an orchard, trails — the property generates its own rhythms. You could not leave for a week and not need to.

What the series has been about

We started with six properties under $500,000 and a question about whether you could afford to be near the water at all. You could, with work to do on the house.

At $750,000, the tradeoffs softened. A house that was already something. A location that was already somewhere even if not on the water.

Here the tradeoffs mostly disappear. What you’re buying instead is singularity. One point lot catching two light exposures. One timber frame in walking distance of Center Harbor. One approved boathouse permit on 393 feet of Alton frontage. One gated island in a protected cove on the most famous lake in New Hampshire.

Each the only one of itself. That’s what the price is measuring.

We’ll be continuing this series, but stepping away from the water’s edge — because so much of this region enjoys the water without living on it. If you haven’t already, subscribe to get the series and other pieces we write straight to your inbox, three times a week.

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

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

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Sometimes the lake they think they want is exactly where they end up. But often, after a few conversations and some gentle nudging from us (in the form of “but wait until you see the views on Ossipee Lake”) or from the universe (in the form of prices and square feet and acreage), they start to ask: which lake do we actually want to wake up to every day?

It’s a reasonable question. It’s also still slightly the wrong one, or at least it’s missing something. Because there are actually two questions buried in it, and most people only ask one.

The first is how you want to be here. This one deserves more honest consideration than it usually gets. Seasonal means arriving when the place is fully alive and leaving whent hat energy goes. You get the lakes at their most beautiful, the towns at their most energized, the version of New Hampshire that shows up in photographs. Year-round means all of that plus February. It means mud season and the particular quiet of a town that has gone back to itself and a lake that belongs, for about six months, almost entirely to the people who stay.

Neither is wrong. But they lead to different second questions.

If you’re here seasonally, you’re choosing which version of the Lakes Region in full expression fits you. The parade or the quiet. The energy that builds all afternoon or the cove that nobody else found. All of these lakes are beautiful in July. The question is which kind of beautiful is yours.

If you’re here year-round, the question gets harder and more specific: which lake on a Tuesday in November? What the drive to the grocery store feels like. What your neighbor’s dock looks like with the boats pulled. Whether the quiet feels like the thing you were looking for or the thing you were trying to get away from.

That’s what actually sorts people. And the lakes sort differently than you’d think.

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Lake Winnipesaukee

Here’s something people discover only after they’ve been here a while: Winnipesaukee is not one experience. It’s at least three, depending on which town you call home.

The lake from Wolfeboro is the postcard. Walkable, waterfront, boats at the dock, something happening without needing to look for it. Mornings with coffee near the water before the day fills in, and by midafternoon it’s movement and tour buses and families and energy that compounds on itself in the good way. Wolfeboro delivers on the Lakes Region promise fully, and it knows it. That’s the deal.

The lake from Alton Bay is different in a way that’s hard to explain until you feel it. Less curated. Not polished for visitors. Boats that have been at these docks longer than most visitors have been coming, and a pace that doesn’t reset itself for the weekend crowd. It’s the version of Winni that still belongs, unmistakably, to the people who live there. If that distinction matters to you, it’s the whole draw.

The lake from Laconia and Meredith is the connected version. Water and mountains and a real downtown all within reach of each other, without needing to relocate your entire day. Infrastructure. Options. The restaurant that surprises you. Andrea lives on this stretch of Winni and still occasionally gets slightly smug about it, which is probably justified.

Same 72 square miles. Three meaningfully different lives.

What Winnipesaukee asks is that you be honest about which version you actually want, not which one sounds best. The buyer who wants Alton Bay’s authenticity but buys near Meredith because the services are better will spend years feeling slightly off. The buyer who wants Wolfeboro’s energy but buys somewhere quieter because they think they should will feel it every time they’re here. It’s a big lake. It has room for all of it. The question is whether you know which part is yours.

Squam Lake

Less display. More presence.

You don’t stumble into Squam. You’re either here on purpose or you’re not here at all. Four public boat launches on the entire lake; the Squam Lakes Association has been protecting this place since 1904, and the protection is visible in everything. Undisturbed shoreline. Eagles nesting in old hemlocks. Mist sitting on the coves in early morning longer than it does anywhere else, and loons calling across water so quiet the sound carries.

The people who are unhappy here bought the privacy and then felt the absence of everything else. No marina. No restaurant on the water. Limited access even for owners; the understood framing is that you’re a steward of something, not a customer of it. If that excites you, Squam is yours. If it sounds like a constraint, listen to that.

What Squam asks is real presence. Not just ownership. You have to actually want to be in this specific quiet, on this specific water, without needing it to do much for you. The people who love it most are the ones who’ve been everywhere and have finally arrived at the conclusion that less is the thing they were looking for all along.

Newfound Lake

One of the cleanest lakes in the world. Most people have no idea.

You feel it the moment you wade in; not just visually but physically, that quality of cold clear water that makes you hold still for a second before you move. The clarity doesn’t come from the absence of activity. It comes from the water itself. There’s a stillness to Newfound that doesn’t perform for you.

That’s worth sitting with. Newfound doesn’t give you much to do with it. It doesn’t have Winnipesaukee’s energy or Squam’s drama. What it has is the water, and if the water is enough; if you’re the kind of person who can lie on a dock for two hours watching light change on the bottom and call that a full afternoon; then Newfound asks very little of you and gives back something most lakes don’t.

The people here tend to be self-sufficient in a particular way. They arrived with their own plans, and the lake is the context, not the itinerary. Newfound doesn't hand you a weekend. The people happiest here showed up with their own plans and found the lake a worthy backdrop for them. If you're expecting the place to do more of the work, this probably isn't it. If that characterization made you want to defend yourself, you’re probably a Newfound person.

Lake Winnisquam

Close enough to everything to stay connected. Quiet enough to feel like you’ve stepped out of the main current.

Winnisquam sits just south of Winnipesaukee, connected to it by the river, and it offers something the big lake doesn’t: the feeling of being on a substantial body of water without the full force of summer pressing in from every direction. Lighter boat traffic. Quieter mornings. The Belknap Range catching the first light in still water, and nobody else awake yet to see it.

There’s one thing Winnisquam asks that people don’t always anticipate. You will have to explain it. People will ask why you’re not on Winnipesaukee, and you’ll need an answer that isn’t defensive and doesn’t lean on price. The people happiest here made the choice deliberately and can say exactly why they wanted this over that. If you’re still trying to talk yourself into it, it probably isn’t the right lake. If you already know and you’re just confirming it, it probably is.

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Ossipee Lake

Most people drive past it. Route 16 doesn’t do it any favors; the lake and the mountains behind it are both invisible from the highway until you turn off and go looking. Then it shifts. Open water in the shadow of the Ossipee Range, clear and spring-fed, wide views that make you understand why people stop searching once they’ve found it.

Ossipee asks an honest reckoning with remoteness. You’re not near a lot of things, and on the days when you need a good restaurant at seven or a hardware store open on Sunday, you’ll feel that. The trade is real: space and beauty and the satisfaction of having found something most people drove past, in exchange for proximity to things you used to take for granted. For the right person, that’s not a trade at all. It’s the whole point.

Jenn is still slightly annoyed every time she’s out here that more people don’t ask about it. It’s just that beautiful.

Lovell Lake

Jenn lives near Lovell. When Andrea needs to get away from the Winni energy, she drives up to meet her at the Wakefield Inn for cocktails. That sentence tells you most of what you need to know.

Lovell is smaller, only miles from the New Hampshire-Maine border. A stone footbridge reaches a small island, which means if you make friends with the owners of the single home on that island, you can walk over with a bottle of wine depending on the season. Kids fish from the shore. Nobody is performing for anyone. The town center in Sanbornville is walkable; Portland is forty-five minutes if you need the city to feel real for a day.

What Lovell asks is that you not need to be impressive about where you live. It doesn’t have the name recognition. People won’t know it. If that bothers you even slightly, you’re not a Lovell person. If you read that sentence and felt something like relief, you probably are. Most of your neighbors grew up there and, if they work locally, are in the trades. Which means you’ll have your pick of carpenters and plumbers, and because they’re your neighbors, they’ll actually show up.

Great East Lake

You don’t get here by accident. You might get briefly lost on the way. Worth it.

Great East straddles the New Hampshire-Maine line, and what you find when you arrive is a lake that makes you genuinely wonder why it isn’t more known. Clear to the bottom. Open and unhurried. Old summer camps and year-round homes giving the shoreline the kind of character that newer, more uniform developments don’t have. The sunsets here, the last light breaking through the pines and spreading across the water, are the kind people drive over from other lakes to watch.

Great East fits the person who wants the camp-feeling back. Not nostalgia, exactly. More like proof that a particular kind of summer is still available if you go looking for it. Screen doors and dock afternoons and children who don’t ask for anything other than more time in the water and a popsicle. What it asks is commitment to the drive. Great East isn’t on the way to anything. Every visit is a deliberate choice, and the people who love it tend to be people who don’t mind that.

One more thing worth saying.

The choice feels higher-stakes than it is.

Part of what makes the Lakes Region unusual is that you’re not choosing one body of water and closing the door on everything else. You’re choosing a home base, and from almost anywhere here, the whole ecosystem is within reach. Squam people are on Meredith’s waterfront for dinner in twenty minutes. Ossipee people make the drive to Wolfeboro when they want the postcard for an afternoon or a multi-course dinner. Lovell puts you closer to Great East than you’d think and forty-five minutes from Portland when you want it.

The fear most people carry into this search is: what if I choose wrong? In our experience, people who’ve done the real work of asking themselves what they actually want; not what looks good, not what their friends have, but what they genuinely need from a place, rarely end up wrong. The mistake almost always happens when someone skips that question and buys the most obvious (and expensive) answer.

The lakes have personalities. So do you. The question is whether you know yours well enough to the lakes speak to you.

If you’re still working that out, we’re a good conversation to have.

Here’s to finding your lake.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

Not out loud, probably. But in the car on the way home from visits. In the shower. At 3 a.m. when your brain decides it’s a good time to run through everything you haven’t said yet and everything that is worrying you.

You know what you want to bring up. You’ve been collecting evidence, in the way you do when you’re worried: the railing on the back stairs that wobbles a little more each time. The way the driveway looked after the last snowstorm. The offhand comment your mother made about not having anyone to call when the furnace made that sound in February.

You’re not in crisis mode. No one has taken the dreaded fall. There have been no ambulances or sirens. You’re in the slower, quieter mode that comes before crisis mode, the one where you can see something clearly but don’t quite have the words to say it without making it into a bigger thing than your parent is ready for.

You’re waiting for the right moment.

Here’s the thing about the right moment: it almost never announces itself as such. It doesn’t show up as a quiet Saturday morning with good lighting and everyone in a receptive mood and nobody anywhere to be. You could wait for that version for a long time.

What actually works, in our experience, doesn’t look like a conversation at all - at least not a structured one.

We’ve sat with a lot of families on the other side of these transitions. The ones who navigated them well (not without difficulty, not without grief, but without the kind of rupture that leaves relationships broken) tend to describe the same beginning.

Not a sit-down. Not a family meeting. A single question, in a sideways moment.

In the car on the way back from lunch. On a walk around the block. While you’re helping with something, dishes after dinner, a box your parent wanted help moving from the basement. While your attention is technically somewhere else, and theirs is too.

The sideways approach isn’t a trick. It’s not manipulation. It’s just that being face-to-face across a table when the topic is heavy and consequential tends to make both people perform slightly different versions of themselves. The table is a stage. The car is just the car.

What you’re trying to do is lower the stakes enough that the first sentence can actually come out.

So what does that sentence sound like?

Not: We’ve been worried about you.

Not: We think you should start thinking about your options.

Not: We need to talk about the house.

Those are sentences that close things down. They signal that the conversations has already happened, just with someone else, and the outcome has already been decided. And your parent will feel that, even if you mean it with complete love, even if you’ve been losing sleep over this for two years.

The ones that tend to open things: This winter was brutal - how was it for you? Or: I noticed the grass is pretty high, is that getting to be a lot? Or if you have a relationship that invites this: I’ve just been thinking about you. Is there anything on your mind that you haven’t quite figured out how to bring up?

The common thread is that they’re genuine questions. Not setup questions. Not the first move in a chess game where you already know what you want the outcome to be. Just: I’m curious about your experience. I’m paying attention. I want to understand.

And then — this is the part most people rush past — you have to be willing to hear whatever the answer is.

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Sometimes the answer is: Oh, I’m fine. It’s been fine. And that’s the whole conversation.

That’s okay. That’s not a failure. That’s information. You learned something about where they are right now, and you left the door open without forcing anything through it.

Sometimes the answer surprises you. Sometimes the person who has seemed unbothered brings up something they’ve been thinking about for months, and they’ve just been waiting for someone to ask. We see this more than you’d expect. The parent who seems dug in, who everyone assumes will resist any conversation about change, who has in fact been sitting quietly with their own version of this for a long time. They just needed someone to ask, to give them tacit permission to admit that its time for a change.

Sometimes the answer is a deflection that’s also an invitation: I don’t know, it’s a lot to think about. That’s not a no. That’s a maybe, and a maybe is something you can come back to.

The mistake most people make isn’t asking the wrong question. It’s expecting the first question to do too much.

The first conversation is not supposed to resolve anything. It’s supposed to exist. It’s supposed to let your parent know that this topic is something you can hold together, that you’re not going to panic or push or treat them like a problem to be solved. That you’re paying attention, and you’re not afraid of the conversation.

Once that’s been established, once your parent has some evidence that you can sit with the hard parts without flinching, the next conversation is easier. And the one after that easier still.

The families who make it through well don’t usually describe a single turning-point conversation. They describe a slow building of context, over multiple visits, where the topic moved gradually from unspeakable to imaginable to plannable. None of those individual moments felt like a breakthrough. The breakthrough was letting them accumulate through space and time.

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One more thing worth saying.

You might be the child who has been trying to start this conversation for a while, and it hasn’t landed. You asked a sideways question and got nothing. You mentioned the railing once and it went nowhere. You’re starting to wonder if the door will ever open.

It might not open on your timeline. And that’s genuinely hard when you’re carrying the worry of it.

What we’ve seen: the door almost always opens eventually, if you keep appearing at it without forcing it. If you keep visiting. If you keep asking real questions. If you keep making it clear that you’re not there to take something away but to figure something out together.

The person who finally gets to have the real conversation is almost always the one who was willing to have five unremarkable ones first.

If you’re in this right now — not in crisis, not in emergency mode, just in that particular kind of vigilant waiting — we’re happy to talk through what we’re seeing in the region, what the market looks like for the type of property your parent has, and what families tend to wish they’d asked earlier. No agenda, no timeline. Just context that sometimes makes the next question a little easier to form.

Here’s to the conversations that start small and go somewhere important.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

Someone calls us, or walks into the office, because they’ve seen a property online and they want to go look at it. There are forms to sign first, consumer protection requirements that are just part of how real estate works, and then we get them in the door as quickly as we can, because if they think its worth seeing, someone else probably does too.

Most of the time, that first property isn’t the one. It’s too small, or the lot isn’t what they imagined, or the road noise is more than the listing photos suggested, or they stand in the kitchen and something just doesn’t click. That’s normal. Its pretty rare that the first house you see is the one you buy. And it’s also when the real conversation - and the real relationship- begins.

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Once we know someone a little — once we’ve driven somewhere together and stood in a few rooms and started to understand how they see a space — we send them a invitation to tell us more via a form. We call it Your Home Search Story.

The name is deliberate. It’s not a requirements checklist or a property criteria sheet. It’s an invitation to tell us what this search is actually about, now that we’ve met and there’s a little trust in the room.

Most of what’s in it is what you’d expect. Which towns interest you. What your budget looks like. How many bedrooms. What your deal breakers are. Buyers come to these questions prepared; they’ve been thinking about them for months. They can answer the house questions with something close to a spreadsheet.

But there are a few questions in there that land differently. That we hear slow folks down a bit to think.

If this purchase went exactly the way you hope, what would life look like on the other side?

And then, a few questions later:

If nothing changed and you didn’t move, what would that mean for you?

The first question is easier. People have been carrying the good version of this in their heads for a long time. The lake out the back window. The commute that changes from traffic on a major highway to none at all, or to winding around a lake or over a mountain. The kids with room to run. Chickens in the back yard. The mornings that feel different. The question just gives them permission to say it plainly, and most people are ready to.

The second question is different.

The answers we get are almost always more serious than people expect to put into words on a form. Nobody says “nothing” or “I’d just keep looking.” What comes back is closer to something they’ve been aware of but haven’t quite named out loud yet. Something about what staying means for their children, or their work, or the version of their life they’re actually trying to build. These answers sometimes hit in a way that you don’t get to by talking about square footage and acreage. People rarely describe a housing problem. They describe something more fundamental than that - a vision of what they are afraid their life might become if they stay where they are.

We ask it because we need to understand it. Not to test anyone, and not because the answer changes what we do logistically. But because once we know what someone is actually trying to move toward, or away from, we see houses differently on their behalf. We notice different things during a showing. We ask different questions when we’re standing in a backyard or looking out at a view.

We also ask buyers to rate, on a scale of one to ten, how ready they feel right now. And then: if you’re not at a ten, what would need to happen?

People sit with that one for a moment. The number that comes out is sometimes lower than they expected to say. And what they describe needing — one more visit to understand what winters actually feel like here, a clearer picture of what happens with their current home, a conversation with their kids about what the move would mean — tells us how to pace the search and what to pay attention to. Occasionally it tells us someone isn’t quite ready yet. That’s important to know. Better to understand it at the beginning than to piece it together after house number twelve.

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We wrote about this earlier this year — the question we wish every buyer asked themselves before starting a search. This is the other side of that: the questions we ask, once we’ve met and started to earn the right to ask them, so the search that follows is built on something real.

The bedrooms and the acreage and the town preferences matter. We pay close attention to all of it. But a house that fits the criteria without fitting the life underneath the criteria isn’t the right house. And we can’t help someone find what they’re looking for if we only understand the surface version of what they’re looking for.

If you want to work through these questions before we meet, or you’ve already been out with us and are ready to go deeper, the form is here. We read every answer. The conversation we have afterward tends to be a better one because of it.

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

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes

Not fully open yet. Not still closed. The farm stands are starting to set up their signs again, hand-lettered on plywood, leaning at the end of driveways. The boat launches are clearing. The mud that made the back roads feel personal, like they were selecting who got through, has started to firm up. The light is so long now it catches you off guard in the evening, still pale and bright at 7:30 when something in your body keeps expecting dark.

This is what May asks of you. Not arrival. Orientation.

If you've been here through early spring, you already know what this moment is.

This is what we’ve been calling Locals Season — the stretch from ice-out to Memorial Day when the Lakes Region belongs entirely to itself. The ski areas have closed. The summer camps are still shuttered. The roads are just starting to recover from mud season. It’s the particular window when the parking lots are manageable and the trails are yours and nothing is performing itself for anyone yet.

May is where Locals Season hands things off. Not abruptly. Gradually. Something in the pace shifts from inward to anticipatory. The question stops being will winter end and starts being what will spring actually ask of us.

People who arrive in June for the first time every summer love it here. Of course they do. The light on the water in June is almost unfair in its beauty. The lupine are still going along the roadsides. The air smells like something green and growing and recently washed. Summer in the Lakes Region is genuinely, objectively spectacular, and we wouldn’t want anyone to miss it.

But May feels different if you were here in February.

The farm stand egg sign at the end of a road you drove past for three dark months. The evening you notice the peepers have started, that high, urgent chorus coming up from the wetlands at dusk. The day the dock goes back in and the lake stops looking like a photograph of itself and starts looking like a place that people inhabit again. These things land differently when you’ve been waiting for them. Not impatiently. Just... attentively. The way you wait for something you trust is coming even when you can’t see it yet.

May is the proof that it was worth it.

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We don’t think enough people talk honestly about what the transition actually feels like.

There’s a version of the spring narrative that’s all relief and celebration. The Instagram version, where everyone is paddleboarding and the flowers are out and the captions say things like “FINALLY” in all caps. And sure. There’s some of that.

But May also has a quality that’s harder to name. A kind of attentiveness that the busier months don’t quite allow for. You’re viscerally aware, in May, of things you’ll stop noticing by July. The exact moment the osprey comes back to the nest on the platform at the edge of the lake. The way the light changes as the leaves start to fill in and the afternoon shadows get longer and more complicated. The first kayak of the year, when the water is still cold enough that you’re aware of exactly how close you are to it and every sprinkle from the paddle makes you feel more alive.

Memorial Day is ahead. The summer people will come, and we genuinely want them here. The region needs them, economically and spiritually, because a place that only ever sees itself in its quiet mode loses something too. The energy that arrives in June is real. The kid shrieking off the dock at the public beach, the traffic on 16 on a Saturday, the line at the Bailey’s Bubbles in Wolfeboro. All of it part of the thing.

But right now, in May, there’s still space. Space to be watching for the transition before it transitions fully.

If you’re thinking about the Lakes Region from a distance, this is the month that rewards paying attention.

Not because it’s the prettiest. It isn’t, quite, not yet. Some years there’s still a patchy remnant of snow on the north faces of the hills into the first week of May. The roadsides go through an awkward phase, brown and matted, before the green takes over. Mud season leaves its mark.

But what May has is this: the before.

The before of the lake filling with boats. The before of the reservations becoming hard to get and the parking lots becoming difficult. The before of summer, which is a whole other kind of beautiful.

People who know the Lakes Region in May know something about it that the summer people might never realize. They know how it wakes up. They know what it looks like in the early hours of itself, before it's fully arrived.

That knowledge is worth something. Not just practically. Something harder to describe. The knowing that you've seen this place in its quieter moods, not just the showstopper that is late June.

We’ve been watching Mays for a while now. Each one a little different. Some years it comes in all at once and you blink and it’s gone. Some years it’s drawn out, slow and cool and generous, giving you weeks of the in-between. This year it feels like the latter, so far.

The lake is open. The peepers are put on a show every evening. The farm stands are coming back to life one by one.

Getting ready isn’t the same as ready. But it’s its own thing, worth slowing down for.

Here’s to the in-between.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea, Keys to the Lakes

P.S. If you’re curious about what it actually means to live here across the seasons, we’re doing a talk at the Meredith Public Library on May 5th. It’s informal, it’s free, and it’s exactly the kind of conversation we like best. Come find out if the Lakes Region is your kind of place.

You’ve done the research. You know which towns you like. You’ve been on the Zillow app long enough that you recognize properties the moment they hit the market, sometimes before the photos load. You’ve had the conversations with your partner about timing. You’ve run the numbers more than once. You’ve told yourself: when the moment is right, we’ll know.

And in the meantime, you wait.

We understand this. We’ve watched a lot of people do it, and we’ve never thought it was foolish. Neither real estate in general nor the Lakes Region in particular is a casual decision. It’s a big financial decision that sits inside a lifestyle decision, and those deserve care.

But there’s something worth saying honestly about the math we see many buyers doing right now. Because the signal you’re waiting for may not arrive in the form you’re expecting. And the difference between strategic patience and quiet drift is hard to see from the inside.

Here’s what the market is telling us right now.

Homes in the Lakes Region are closing at an average of 97% of list price. Not 90%. Not 85%, which is what you might expect from a market that rewards the buyer who is patient enough to wait out sellers. Ninety-seven percent. Which means, in practical terms, that sellers are not negotiating much. That the homes that are priced correctly are moving. That the idea of waiting for a softening that gives you room to offer significantly below ask and close the gap is, for most properties in most segments of this market, not a strategy the data supports.

We’re not saying this to create urgency. We’re genuinely not. If you’ve read anything else we’ve written, you know that’s not how we operate.

We’re saying it because the math buyers are running privately often includes an assumption that patience is earning them something. And in some markets, it does. In this one, right now, it mostly isn’t. What patience is earning you is time, which has its own value. But it is not earning you a materially different price.

There’s a second thing the data reflects that’s worth naming.

Inventory in the Lakes Region has not softened this spring in a way that expands buyer options. The selection isn’t growing while you wait. The particular configuration of lake, town, price point, and property type that fits your situation isn’t accumulating in a queue somewhere.

If anything, the properties that check most of the boxes tend to move before they've had time to sit. Just this week, a well-priced property in a good location came onto the market through a colleague. Not a unicorn. Just a solid fit in the right place at the right number. Three showings were scheduled through us alone the first day, with additional inquiries from other agents. A fourth buyer we are working with called with genuine interest but couldn't get there for ten days. We told them we'd put them on the schedule, but that they should plan accordingly. They understood what that meant.

Which means the math cuts both ways. Waiting isn’t earning you a better price. And it isn’t improving your odds on selection either.

Strategic patience looks like this: you know what you’re waiting for. You have a trigger. When the right property comes onto the market, you’re ready to move. Or when a property that is close to right comes onto the market in the place you actually want to be, you’re ready to move. Your financing is in order. Your priorities are clear. Your timeline is honest. You’ve done the work so that action is possible when the moment arrives.

Drift looks a little different. The timeline keeps shifting. The signal you’re waiting for has never been precisely defined. You’re not sure if you’re waiting for prices to change, or for your life to feel more settled, or for the right property, or for something harder to name. The waiting has become the plan rather than a preparation for the plan.

Both can look identical from the outside. Both can feel entirely reasonable from the inside. The distinction is whether, if the right property appeared tomorrow, you’d be ready to act. Or whether you’d need more time.

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The out-of-state buyer has a particular version of this challenge.

You’re making a decision from a distance, about a place you love but don’t live in yet, during a period of your life that probably has its own competing demands. You’re watching a market you can’t walk through on a Tuesday morning. You’re calibrating off photographs and Zillow estimates and whatever your last visit felt like. And you’re waiting for a signal clear enough to cut through all of that uncertainty and make the decision feel obvious.

Here’s the thing about that signal: it’s probably not coming from the market. The market isn’t going to announce itself as the right moment. Prices are not going to drop meaningfully enough to resolve the ambiguity you’re feeling. Interest rates are not going to align themselves into a number that suddenly makes the math simple. The window of perfect clarity that makes a major decision feel consequence-free does not, in our experience, tend to open.

What actually happens is different. The decision gets made because a specific property arrived, and your life had reached a moment where you were willing to trust what you already knew. Not because conditions were perfect. Because you were ready.

We are not asking you to buy something you’re not ready to buy.

We’re asking you to think honestly about what ready means. Whether you’re building toward it with intention, or whether you’ve been in the same conversation with yourself for longer than feels comfortable to admit.

Because there’s a version of watching the market that is genuinely useful. You learn the towns. You understand the price ranges. You develop a clear sense of what your money buys on different bodies of water. That knowledge sharpens your instincts and saves you time when the right moment comes.

And there’s a version where watching the market has become a substitute for deciding. Where the research is thorough enough to feel like action. Where the right moment keeps getting deferred to a future version of circumstances that is, functionally, never going to arrive.

If you’re in the first category, keep going. You’re doing it right. When the property comes, you’ll know what to do with it.

If you’re in the second category, and something in this lands a little uncomfortably, that’s worth sitting with. Not to push you into anything. But because the Lakes Region has a way of still being here when you’re finally ready, and it’s worth being ready.

We’re happy to have that conversation. Not a hard sell on why now is the right time to buy. Just an honest accounting of where things actually stand, what properties in your range are doing, and what it would actually take to be in a position to move when you find the right one.

That’s a twenty-minute phone call that tends to be worth it, regardless of what you decide afterward.

Here’s to knowing the difference between waiting well and waiting out of habit.

🧭 Jenn & Andrea

Keys to the Lakes