We started going up to Pinecrest sometime in the seventies, when my grandparents had a trailer and we’d camp and fish. There’s a photo of me as a very small girl holding up two fish, and the story that went with it was that I’d caught two at once, both at the same time, like some kind of pint-sized fishing prodigy. I don’t believe that story for a second. I think they just liked saying it. But that’s the thing about a place your family goes for fifty years. It isn’t only where things happen. It’s where the stories get made, true or not, and then told so many times they may as well be true.

I have a lot of those stories, and almost all of them are up at that lake.

There was the year my dad decided we’d all walk around Pinecrest, the whole way around, and I was so young I wasn’t even in school yet, tromping along in little leather sandals. The trouble was the dam. You had to cross the dam to get all the way around, and my mom, my sister, and I were all terrified of the drop-off, none of us willing to walk across it on our own. So my dad took us over one at a time. He’d walk one of us across, come back, walk the next one across, come back, and go again, three separate trips across that dam because three of us were too scared to do it alone and he wasn’t going to leave anyone behind. I didn’t fully appreciate it then. I do completely now.

There was the year my mom’s side of the family came up, and my poppy dropped my sister’s birthday cake right into the dirt. There was the time my aunt took us out on the pedal boats and I got so dehydrated I passed out. There was the summer my dad and his brother rented a sailboat, and the rest of us just sat on the shore and watched the two of them tip it over, and right it, and tip it over again, all afternoon, like a comedy routine neither of them knew they were performing.

As we got older, my parents started renting cabins in Strawberry instead of camping. My mom loved the meadow. My dad loved the fishing. I could tell you their whole marriage in those two sentences. One year the cabin we rented had mice, and at night they’d go skittering across the floor and my mom and sister would absolutely lose it, shrieking in the dark, and I think we switched cabins after that. And for a few years running there was a Saint Bernard up there, big and slobbery, that belonged to someone in the area, and I loved that dog. I’d look for him every year. He was part of the trip to me, that dog, the way the meadow and the fishing were.

My parents kept renting those cabins right into the grandkid years, which is my favorite part, because it means my kids got the lake too.

My dad gave my son a fishing pole and we’d take the boats out just like always. We went up once after my mom had died, and my dad, being my dad, insisted on teaching my son how to gut a fish. He got the knife, he made the first slice, and my poor little boy took one look and passed out cold, right there, instantly. Which felt about right to me, because I once passed out on a pedal boat on that same lake. Some things run in a family. The fainting, apparently, is one of them.

After my dad moved away, I started renting the cabins myself. I’ve kept it going. I’ve taken my youngest up in tents a couple of times. We were up there this year again – making more memories, laughing and connecting.

And that’s the thing I keep turning over about that lake. So many of the people in these stories are gone from it now. My grandparents and their trailer. My poppy and the dropped cake. My mom, who loved the meadow. My dad, who crossed the dam three times and moved away in the end. Even that Saint Bernard. The cast keeps changing. People arrive and grow up and pass on and move away, and the lake just stays, holding all of them, exactly where we left them.

I still go back. I rent the cabin, I tell the story about the two fish I definitely did not catch at the same time. I like knowing the lake still has us in it, and that I’m still adding to the pile of us up there. My mom loved the meadow. It’s still there. I make a point of looking at it every single time.