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My Mum sent me a real estate listing today. It turns out that myuncle is selling the old family cottage where we spent oursummers when I was a kid. And since nobody in the family canafford to buy it, pretty soon it will no longer be a part of the family at all. It is strange that I’m mourning the loss of a place I haven’t seen in years. The last time I was there,I was 16. It was just after the ownership had passed to my uncle, and Mum had recruited me tohelp my Gramma pack up the last of her things. If I had known I wouldn’t see the place again, I might have made a proper goodbye. Then again,with the spirit of cultivated detachment that goes with mid-teenhood, I might not have. Summers at the lake stretch back in my mind as far as anything. Most of it is hazy—fishing forminnows off the dock; painting the floor of the sleeping cabin; the smell of wet bathing suits andwetter dogs; barbecues; tree houses; cans of pop stored in the cold spring. In the centre of it all was my Grampa. If you asked me to relate one complete memory of my Grampa, I might be hard-pressed to do so.But I can tell you that he was there. He was there on the dock in the sun, he was there lighting thewoodstove, he was the sound of Nintendo games coming from the living room and the aroma ofstew wafting up the stairs from the kitchen. Grampa was the arbiter of table manners and of saying grace before meals. He was the onlygrown-up who knew the names of the block-people—the dolls I'd made by drawing faces on woodscraps—who inhabited the screen porch facing the lake. | 
