Up at Butternut Lake (Butternut Lake Trilogy)

  The story of Allie and Wyatt started to take shape in my mind a few years ago when I was watching a TV news story about a local National Guard unit that had been deployed to Afghanistan. In the piece they interviewed the young widow of one of its members, who also had a young son, and she looked absolutely stunned by what had happened to her husband. And I remembered thinking that when her husband joined the National Guard it had probably never occurred to either of them that one day he would be fighting a war half a world away. 
         The story was heartbreaking to me, especially since my own children were still young at the time, and I couldn't imagine my husband not being a part of our lives. I wondered how this family would go on, how they could even begin to rebuild their lives. Hopefully, everyone would rally around them, relatives would come stay with them, neighbors would bring them casseroles, and the son's school would have a fund-raiser.
But then what? What about when all the others had gone back to their own lives? They'd be on their own again, wouldn't they? 
  And then I remembered something a friend of mine who'd lost her husband suddenly had once told me. She said that in some ways the beginning was easier. This period was scary and shocking and incredibly lonely, but everyone knew, or could at least imagine, how difficult it was for her.  Later on was when it got harder. Not because all of them went back to their own lives, but because everyone seemed to be saying to her, in so many words, "So when are you going to get back to your own life?"
  This was especially true of my friend because she was still young, as were her children. Several people--well-meaning, obviously, but misguided--actually said to her: "You're lucky you're still young. You can get married again and give your children another father." And when she pointed out that she wasn't ready to move on, some of these same people seemed impatient with her.
         Maybe, I thought, as I considered that mother on Television, the hardest part would come later for her, as it had for my friend. Or maybe it would be hard in a different way. A new way. And that was when I started thinking about a mother and son who had been through a similar experience. How would they move on? And what if they weren't ready to do so when everyone else wanted them to? How might they handle this in their own time and in their own way? What would it take them, what does it take anyone, really, to start again?  
            I chose to explore that question through the eyes of Allie, a young widow whose National Guardsman husband has died in Afghanistan, and Wyatt, her five-year-old son. This is the story of Up at Butternut Lake.  Mary McNear

Everyone knows that moving forward is never easy, and as the long, lazy days of summer take hold, Allie must learn to unlock the hidden longings of her heart, and to accept that in order to face the future she must also confront--and understand--what has come before.