Sunrise Edgartown

In my latest novel, Reminiscing Over Rainbow Gelato, the main character rises before dawn every morning to catch the sunrise at Edgartown’s Wharf. After reuniting with a previous love interest who is a photographer, she meets him there by chance one morning and he teaches her the secret of framing the perfect shot.

As though hearing its name, the sun lifted a lid and winked—heaven’s eye flirting with slow deliberateness as it shook away the night. A single, golden ray dipped into the water, and a fisher paddling a canoe approached just beyond its reach.

“Wait for the boat to move into the center of the light,” Tommy whispered. The water danced and shimmied as if the sun poured peach nectar onto its surface. While I admired its beauty, Tommy’s laid-back manner sent ripples through me to match the ones in the water. — Excerpt from Reminiscing Over Rainbow Gelato

Henry James once defined writers as those on whom nothing is lost.

I captured this picture at the Edgartown Wharf in 2014. Although it took a few years for it to surface in a novel, the moment is still as fresh as the predawn fall morning that mesmerized me with its gift of light and promise, and I thought of it as I wrote this scene.

Reminiscing Over Rainbow Gelato is filled with first-hand descriptions from my experiences in Edgartown over two autumns. When my publisher, The Wild Rose Press, issued the One Scoop or Two Call for Submission with ice cream in the subject I dusted off the picture folder.

A beach read that must include some kind of frozen dairy?

Immediately thinking of Edgartown and the unique ice cream shops on Martha’s Vineyard, I pulled up several of my favorite pictures and the leather-bound journal I kept at the time.

It appears Henry James was right. This moment may have been delayed, but it wasn’t lost. It isn’t lost on the characters either. As the characters learn, timing is everything.

Reminiscing Over Rainbow Gelato is available for preorder now. Its release date is May 26, 2021, just in time for summer’s opening weekend.

Renee Johnson is the author of Reminiscing Over Rainbow Gelato, Behind The Mask, Herald Angels, Acquisition, and The Haunting of William Gray.  She is currently working on a sweet romance, and a historical novel, while editing a suspense novel which has international flair–an homage to her love of travel and foreign food.  She lives on a farm in North Carolina with her husband, Tony Johnson, and a very spoiled German shepherd named Hansel.