It’s a classic, award-winning film, one of my mother’s favorites, “On Golden Pond” with Katharine Hepburn, Jane Fonda, and the last theatrical production of Henry Fonda. The pond in question is likely based on Great Pond in Belgrade, ME, not far from where my parents live, though the movie was filmed on Squam Lake in Holderness, NH. I think the movie probably reminded my mother of her childhood, likely young Billy’s summer on Golden Pond, largely alone with the woods and waters of Foster Pond, but of course it makes me think of my grandparents’, now my parents’, lake in Maine.

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I almost didn’t take the camera with me. It was late, by “days after solstice” standards, the sun was setting, it had been cloudy all day…. But the minute I stepped outside and saw the sun on the edges of the clouds over the trees between the house and the pond, I was glad that I had!

I found myself, as I walked along in the newfallen snow, dreaming once again about what it would be like to live in my own little place on my own Golden Pond. These lakeside cottages aren’t winterized, of course — they’d be even colder than the unheated little cinderblock house I occupied in Peace Corps Jordan — but hey, it’s my fantasy!

And on an evening like this one, the view from the porch or the stoop just might be worth an extra wool sweater and comforter beside the propane space heater….