It was still there, attached to an oak tree and glowing in the sun.

I had walked down to the shore of the lake cabin in northwest Wisconsin where my family and I had spent 28 summers. We sold it, reluctantly, in 2013 and had returned this August for a family reunion. And to revisit the past.

American novelist Thomas Wolfe famously warned against that very thing in his 1940 book “You Can’t Go Home Again,” about the difficulty of returning to your origins.

Yet here we were, my wife, Marianne, my three children and their families, trying to harmonize our happy memories of Moose Lake and Bluegill Lake, where my children learned to swim, explored the woods and water, and encountered wildlife, with what we were seeing now.

It is no longer the same. Trees were cut. The woodshed I built was go

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