Lucy
Nowadays, twenty miles is not that far. When I worked at the library, I drove it twice a day, and I still go on Saturdays to read to the children and do my shopping. But when I was young we took car travel less lightly, and the men had businesses to run, so they came to the lake only on the weekends, leaving the weekdays to the women and children. Because of this, our lake retreat was really two places: one when the men were there, and another when they were not.
On the weekdays, the strings of our mothers’ aprons hung loose. They drank iced tea on one another’s porches in the late afternoon, reveling in the fact that supper need only be cold sandwiches and that no one with any authority would ask when it would be served. During the heat of the day they played bridge at the picnic t
