The old summer place has been in the family for seven generations, which counting the grand-children makes eight. For most of the year it sits dormant, being more like what was once called a “camp,” with plank walls and little to no insulation outside of the kitchen, with its great stone fireplace hinting at some greater ambition that was seemingly scaled back. It only really comes alive in the summer, when generations of cousins and their children visit, presided over by the surviving elders, who at this point include my mother, who is blind as a bat, and two of her three sisters, who I hope will live forever, so that they can continue to recite tales about the simple pleasures of their childhoods on this very lake, and of the men who came to pay court, and whose advances they ever-so-chastely refused, unless the beau happened to be rich enough, and therefore a fitting prospect for the wedding columns …