Drape’s memoir in prose and poetry ponders the ideas of home, and explores weighty themes of time, loss, and mortality.

The author is a baby boomer, so the remembrance starts with idyllic childhood memories from the ’50s—in her case, during summers at her grandfather’s house on the Long Island Sound. This is followed by her time at Hunter College in New York City where she was on the staff of the student newspaper, covering turbulent times that included civil rights and Vietnam War protests, the student occupation at nearby Columbia University, and the Kent State killings in Ohio. A sense of idealism shades into a tempered disillusionment; she quotes Aristotle: “the young are full of hope, but are easily deceived.” Perhaps the most pivotal occurrence was a fire in the night that destroyed her home in 2001;she, her husband, and their three little girls managed to escape, but the event occasions reflections on luck and loss, and on what is truly important and what is not: Clearly, home was far more than a brick-and-mortar pile. The fire occurred not long after the 9/11 attacks, and she notes that “our private lives had met the zeitgeist.” It’s a theme that runs throughout the book: that one’s personal life is somehow inseparable from larger events. Good times on the water make another appearance at Lake George, one of Drape’s favorite retreats; the chapter that covers it is called “Time’s Long Game,” and its focus is geological: all the eons that it took to carve out the valley, the slow work of glaciers moving at glacial speed, and how this landscape will never stop changing for many years to come. The last chapter, oddly enough, deals with Santa Claus, and opens a discussion of myth and its importance.

Drape is a deeply earnest and experienced writer who grapples with mysteries that have bedeviled many thoughtful people in times of quiet reflection; it can be argued that such grappling never really stops. It even invades our dreams, and perhaps even fuels them. A notable aspect of this book, therefore, is its poetry; readers find reprints of such fine works as Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka” (1911) and John Masefield’s “Sea-Fever” (1902), but other works by Drape are a mixed bag. Early on, especially, she tries to express solemn and heartfelt truths in rhyming couplets—a device that is most often the province of limericks and satire; as such, the sound fights the sense and the sound usually wins—there’s no challenging these old forms. Her later poems without rhymes are often charming, though, such as the haikulike “A Moment’s Peace”: “My little reed boat / Glides quietly down / the river. / There is only now.” This is a slim volume, less than 90 pages in length with a lot of white space, which fittingly gives it the feel of a chapbook. In it, Drape grapples with very familiar themes that are challenging to make new; still, she makes an admirable attempt to do so.

An ambitious remembrance that has much to recommend it, despite uneven execution.