“I am an old person now,” Shirley W. Mayhew ’48 writes in her memoir Looking Back: My Long Life on Martha's Vineyard, which she published last year at the age of eighty-eight. This photo of her on the island is from 1946, not long before she moved there with her husband, John Mayhew ’43.

The book, a vivid collation of sixty years of memories and anecdotes, evokes a place unchanged by the passing of time just as time inevitably ages Shirley and John, who are nourished by an ever-widening circle
of family and friends. With its honesty, humor, and sharp detail, Looking Back straddles this world of timelessness and inexorable change.

Courtesy Shirley Mayhew