At age 21, I left the place of my birth and moved to the opposite side of the country, putting distance between me and my family in order to experience a different way of being, a variety of people and experiences, and reinvent myself a few times over. However, from time to time, usually in summer, I travel back to my family of origin, our shared place and its history.
I went recently. And if I close my eyes, I can smell pine needles releasing their scent on sun-baked granite. I can feel warm grass, earth and moss, the skid of dried oak leaves and the poke of pine cones and acorns on bare feet. I can inhale the heat and humidity gently stirred by lake breezes. I can see myself as a child running toward and away from my family, both sitting compliantly, and wriggling toward freedom - the first stop a plunge into the relief of the clean, clear lake water, which we drank unfiltered straight out of a pipe from the deep.
This place has always had a special hold on my heart and my imagination. Its water was not only of this beautiful place but also of an extended family gathered together, holding so many structural tensions that to speak of them would take a book: hard work and entitlement, judgment and courtship of social status, humility and pride, faith and independent thought, hierarchy and justice, wealth and questioning worthiness, along with the slants of both coasts. Maybe for the first time, I saw with clarity the forces that formed the cultural waters in which I have swum, while distracted by the physical beauty and bounty of the place.
After taking my independence and finding my own way, revisiting family and diving into those waters is oddly reaffirming, calming, and clarifying. These are the people I came from. I am of them and can see in the depths that their leylines are in me. And I am very much myself: I will always have come from these people, they will always have influenced me, and I will always have found my own way. It is no longer that I am the same or different from them or need to be, but rather I recognize the structural tensions we all carry and hold them my own way. Maybe the friction I was running from and the freedom I was running toward find peace in the clarity of that recognition.
Swimming in the Water of My Family
July 28, 2026
Have you ever heard a story so many times that it simply inhabits your imagination fully formed? Learning a new detail revises the whole picture. I learned such a detail in one of my family's origin stories, the story of how Lake George came to be part of the fabric of of our extended family and an important place in my life.
My grandfather, the son of a quaker minister and a single mother, was taken under the wing of a wealthy parishioner who provided him with a fine education first at Moses Brown School and then at Williams College. He first met my grandmother, a young lady of privilege, at Camp of the Woods, a Christian gathering spot on Lake Pleasant in upstate new York. When he attended Williams, he just happened to be in her hometown, but that they married was not a forgone conclusion given their disparity of wealth and society. and Camp of the Woods, although not on Lake George at the time of their meeting, began on Lake George as Camp Iroquois, and one way or another, years later, my grandparents, married and with children, found their way back in summer to a rented cottage on Lake George with their young family.
Dearie and Bop arrived, and there was a kerfuffle in the car. Bop refused to get out, didn't want to see anymore, thought the drive was a waste of time and whole situation preposterous. Dearie got out anyway. She had her own ideas. In fact, she had her own money, the stuff men of her generation could use to keep their wives in check. There was no checking Dearie: she was her own person, another amplitude for reflection.
As the story goes, Dearie was enchanted. She saw poetry in the lake, the trees, the garden, the grounds. She saw her grandchildren in the context of this place, perhaps even her grandchildren. Here is the detail I had gotten wrong as a youngster or maybe the reality was blurred for the sake of a man's pride: I thought Dearie had helped Mummum and Poppy buy Friends Point - helped. Helping was actually easier on the imagination, because as the generations trickled by, such grand gestures as gifting a former boys camp on nine acres of prime Lake George waterfront on the prominent spit of land the entire area was named after, a landmark known to all boaters on northern Lake George and inaccessible to everyone else, became harder to imagine.
After all these years, that detail changes the story enough. That property was not earned or paid off over time. It was a gift. The 1947 price tag was astonishing compared to today's dollars, but still, it was a very generous gift from a mother to a daughter and her husband who could not afford it, and who spent the rest of his life working to hold it together, maintain it and make it the showcase his wife desired. On that day, in addition to his other roles in life, Poppy became the groundskeeper, their two daughters 19 and 13 became the kitchen staff, and their two sons 10 and 7 became the cabana boys. Mummum was back in the high life again, presiding over the throne room of northern Lake George. Here is more amplitude for reflection.
And so much of my story takes its shape in that moment, frozen in time, in memory, in imagination, through the forces that move us on the inside and shape us on the outside. A man of no means, but of disciplined mind and high moral standards received a free ticket through the best schools, married above his station, and lived well. He continued to preach, was beloved in his community and by his progeny. The frictions were barely visible, but they were everywhere, and he was never entirely comfortable with what was his and what it meant. The internal discomfort is the inheritence of his children and their children, and this is our origin story. Nevermind that we had other parents whose stories informed us as well. This is the one that has called the tune to which we dance.
The Origin Story
July 28, 2026
Poppy, 18 years old at Camp of the Woods in 1923
Meanwhile, on Friends Point, a priest named Monsignor Keegan had been running a Catholic camp for young boys until the great depression brought too few boys to his Camp Chippewa. He continued on to host a visiting bishop, to breed Samoyeds and to organize canoeing and sailing races that started and finished at his dock for the new Northern Lake George Yacht Club. Eventually, Camp Chippewa went on the market.
My grandparents, whom we shall call Mummum and Poppy, because we have all called them Mummum and Poppy since the day my sister the oldest grandchild named them thus, or more likely Mummum herself, invited her parents to come and see it. The great-grandparents, whom we shall call Dearie and Bop, because this is a family story and that is how we know them, drove up from Williamstown. Or I dare say, their chauffeur drove them up. Here, I pause the story to consider that Poppy of humble origins was still a man of modest means. He was a baptist minister and a prominent leader of missionaries world-wide, but his income was not that for living life on the scale his wife had known in her formative years. And I will consider that although Mummum committed herself to God, her husband and her family, she never quite adjusted to the reality of her husband's station in life. Here is amplitude for reflection.
Dearie in the porch arch of her home in Williamstown, MA.
