Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Love on the Chesapeake: Romance, Intimacy, and the Shape of Memory on the Bay

Love on the Chesapeake: Romance, Intimacy, and the Shape of Memory on the Bay

Johns, Bill

Paperback

Series: Chesapeake Unwritten

Romance

ISBN13: 9798288104466
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 14 2025
Pages: 398
Weight: 1.17
Height: 0.82 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Love, romance, and the slow rhythms of intimacy find a unique expression on the Chesapeake Bay. In a world shaped by tides, storms, and shoreline gatherings, Love on the Chesapeake: Romance, Intimacy, and the Shape of Memory on the Bay is a deeply evocative cultural history that captures how love has been practiced, concealed, endured, and remembered along the largest estuary in North America.

From oyster roasts and crab feasts to porch lights left burning for boats delayed by fog, the Chesapeake Bay has always offered a setting where intimacy is shaped by weather, labor, and place. This book traces the hidden architecture of affection-from 19th-century skipjack courtships and ferry-bound proposals to the quiet endurance of elder love and the unspoken bonds between working couples. Here, intimacy does not announce itself. It docks slowly, tends nets, keeps silence in storm, and returns by habit rather than spectacle.

Drawing on diaries, letters, oral histories, and the author's own memories of a life spent boating its waters since the 1950s, this work presents a layered and textured portrait of love's many forms: romantic, filial, queer, interracial, and platonic. It tells of island couples who measured time in tides, not calendars; of love letters written between oyster hauls or slipped inside hymnals; of mixed-race partnerships that found shelter in the crevices of segregated shores; and of a widow's ritual walk along the same dock her husband once paced waiting for the mailboat. The Bay does not separate love from labor. It binds them. A man gutting bluefish beside his wife, silent and precise, is showing more than skill. He is showing fidelity.

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