Saturday, May 4, is the Greenfield Spelling Bee! “Bees” will be “buzzing” from 10 a.m. to noon, and the Friends of the Greenfield Meetinghouse will host bake sale with fabulous treats from Sharon, Warren, Linda, Lenny and other Greenfield bakers!

Children ages 7 to 14 from surrounding towns are welcome, and there is still time to register. Please send email to greenfieldspellingbee@gmail.com or stop by the library. 

There is no end of fascinating people in small towns. It had been on my list for a while to catch up with Diana Dunbar Place, an old friend and Francestown resident, who launched a new business, Third Act Quest, during COVID. Third Act Quest and the project which has grown out of it, the 333 Collective, inspire and support women to live their best, richest lives in the “third act,” over the age of 50. 

Diana and her husband, Brooks, moved the Francestown full-time nearly 20 years ago to raise their daughter Emma, who is now a college graduate. While Brooks had deep roots in Francestown,  Diana, who spent 20 years as a marketing executive, wasn’t entirely sure about moving to the Monadnock region.

“I was used to living in Boston and (Washington, D.C.), but my husband’s family was here, and we knew this was the best place to raise our daughter. We wanted her to be raising chickens instead of hanging out at the mall! But I wasn’t entirely sure what there was up here for me,” Place said. “But at some point I took a class at the Sharon Arts Center, and someone invited me to a reception afterwards. I called my husband on the way home and I said, ‘The people I met tonight were some of the most lovely and interesting people I had met in a long time.’ I was like, ‘I get it now!’” 

Place also recalls going to a performance in Peterborough that opened her eyes to the depth of culture in the region. 

“In the winter, at night, Peterborough can look like a ghost town. But then I walked into this performance, and it’s an opera soprano from New York City and this incredible orchestra, and the performance was packed. Just driving by in these small towns, you would never know how much there is going on,” Place said. 

Third Act Quest, which offers retreats, trips and programs for women over 50, was inspired partly by Place’s own life experiences in seeing the ways her mother and her grandmother responded to their third stage of life, or “third act.” 

“My own mother was focused on taking care other people her whole life, and she kind held herself back. Once her family was grown, she stopped engaging, and stepped back from life, at kind of a young age. In contrast, my grandmother never stopped embracing life. She went to Spain in her 70s, and wrote a book about it,” Place said. “In my own life, I spent a lot of time dancing around the edge of my real passions; now I can engage in what I really want to do. This is the time when we can write the best chapter in our own life stories.”

Third Act Quest spawned the 333 Collective, an international online community of women over 50 offering support and inspiration. On May 6 and 7 in Bristol, R.I., the 333 Collective is hosting the Quest 2024 Live Gathering, where members of the collective will meet in person for the first time.

Monadnock region women who will be featured at the gathering include longtime Francestown community volunteer Marsha Dixon, Ellen Smith, founder of European Esthetics in Peterborough; Lisa Arnold, a Keene-based photographer; and Jeannie Demers, an NLP and tapping coach from Walpole. 

“The purpose of the 333 Collective is inspire and reframe the whole experience of aging by reconnecting women as they start life’s most exciting chapter,” Place said. “A lot of women have spent a lot of their lives taking care of other people. Now, at this stage in our lives, women over 50 can rethink our plans for our lives, and think about what it is we really want.” 

For more information about Third Act Quest, the 333 Collective and Quest 2024, go to thirdactquest.com.