Roots, and the work of belonging.
A century of family in Midcoast Maine, and the ongoing, steady work of building the small systems — a nature program, a babysitting co-op, a rebuilt community lodge — that make a place worth staying in.
Over a hundred years in Midcoast Maine.
Peabody's family has reveled in Maine for over a hundred years — with each generation's children imprinted with a love of nature by the same beloved sanctuaries: Beauchamp Point, Fernalds Neck and the mossy woods between them.
Her great-grandmother, the poet and playwright Josephine Preston Peabody, is the name Peabody carries. JPP brought her children, Alison Peabody Marks and Lionel Peabody Marks, to summer in Maine from their earliest days at the turn of the 20th century, away from their home in Cambridge, where her husband, Lionel Simeon Marks, was Dean of the Harvard Engineering School. In the 1950s, Peabody's grandparents, Lionel and Jane Marks, sailed their boat Tamarack up from their home in Larchmont, New York to the Midcoast every summer with their three daughters — Jennifer, Joan, and Jody (short for Josephine). Peabody's mother, Joan, spent weeks with her sisters every year at Maine's Little Wohelo camp, nine years old on the cover of its brochure. Jane later retired to Camden year round, the first in the family to make this coast a full-time home — where Peabody and her sister would spend summer days when she was a child. Now she lives in Rockport year-round with her young family, who each carry on the family names.
Today, her own children suspend time searching for hermit crabs, picking berries, and exploring the shore’s crevices and the wood's canopies with the same unhurried magic their ancestors did.
What follows isn't a curated set of best photographs. It's an archive of a family choosing this place for more than a hundred years.
Community in practice
PROGRAM DESIGN
Arboretum Nature Hunt
Peabody conceived, designed, and led an all-ages nature program built around a wordless scavenger hunt for preschool-age children — a hand-drawn map taped into field notebooks, using only images so pre-readers could navigate independently. Families explored a local arboretum tracking their sightings, ending together in a native bramble grove where children shared their discoveries, played, and examined specimens under a microscope.
COMMUNITY INFRASTRUCTURE
Kids Fun Night
Peabody helped reinvigorate a community babysitting co-op in Silverlake, CA that had thrived through the 1980s and '90s before falling out of use. Every other Saturday, one family hosts four or five others' children for an afternoon of play, a simple dinner, and a movie, with hosting rotating among the group — a small, sustainable system that builds community among children and gives parents a shared, reciprocal break.
REBUILDING, TOGETHER
Nature Friends Lodge
The Eaton Fire destroyed the Nature Friends Lodge, a historic community gathering place in Sierra Madre where Peabody grew up and has long been a member. Less than ten months after the fire, the organization rallied a volunteer effort — including Peabody's own labor — to build a temporary deck on the site of the loss and hold Oktoberfest, a tradition the community had kept for decades.
