13-17 July 2026

E.B. White’s 1941 essay “Once More to the Lake” about his pilgrimage back to the lakefront resort in Maine he visited as a child is a masterpiece often taught in—or, perhaps more accurately, once often taught in—freshman English courses.  The last time I taught English 401, I was encouraged to use a collection of quite mediocre student essays as the course “text,” a baffling pedagogical development I chose to ignore, feeling as I too often did in my last few years of teaching that the time was disconcertingly out of joint.

Like White’s essay and my experience of teaching it, my recent trip to Squam Lake (of On Golden Pond fame) was haunted by nostalgia, a term coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer as a translation of the German Heimweh (homesickness), a composite formed from the Greek nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain) to describe the profound melancholia experienced by Swiss mercenaries fighting far away from their native Alpine terrain.  The emotion is a complex one, and the word to describe it evasive, elusive, and (it seems) culturally specific.  In Turkish, the word is hüzün, a shared, quiet state of loss.  I’m partial to the Portuguese saudade, pronounced as an onomatopoetic sigh, a deep emotional state of melancholic longing, a bittersweet yearning for the absent presence of someone or something that is loved and irretrievably lost, combining the sadness of that loss with the warmth and joy of having loved.

What word best describes what is driving Matt Damon’s Odysseus in the Christopher Nolan film, as opposed to Homer’s Odyssey?  A topic for a different post.  This one is about my friend Cameron’s and my return to places we’d visited with our late husbands, hers the composer Russell Peck, whose music was often programmed for the New Hampshire Summer Music Festival held each summer at Plymouth State, and my David, classmates at the University of Michigan in the turbulent late sixties, both of them part of the avant-garde John Cage-affiliated progressive new music scene then in Ann Arbor.  Cameron and Russell spent 13 seasons around the New Hampshire lake district, and twice David and I went up—once even flew up in a doughty Piper Warrior!—to join them for concerts and long conversations had while afloat in a lake, once Squam and once Kanasatka.  Cameron had not been back for decades; neither had I—and quite possibly David and I were along on that couple’s last return to the lakes.  I can’t remember the year.

But Russell departed this dimension in 2009, as did David in 2019.  Could the wives left behind return to the lake and recapture any of that joy?  The answer:  Reader, we did. Ocular proof follows.