It was still there, attached to an oak tree, glowing in the sun. I had walked down to the shore of the lake cabin in Northwestern Wisconsin where we had spent 28 summers. We sold it, reluctantly, in 2013, and 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 and my three children and their families, trying to harmonize our happy memories of Moose Lake and Bluegill Lake near Hayward — where my children learned to swim, explore the woods and water, and encounter wildlife — with what we were seeing now.

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

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