I sit on the beach at Colchester Point and look west across the wide expanse of Lake Champlain where the Adirondacks gather thick storm clouds to their summits. I scoop dry sand flecked with bits of white clamshell into my hands, then open my palms to the sky, letting sand and shell slip through my fingers. What I sift through feels old, the same sand that I poured from palm to palm as a child, the same remnants of shale and limestone scoured by melting glaciers thousands of years ago. It is the last day of August and a month of rain has the lake brimming. From the southwest a burst of wind hits my face, scattering my hair in tangles. 

Most of the storms that roll onto this shore sweep across the lake from the southwest, ushered in by the Adirondack peaks on the lake’s far side. Sometimes, storm clouds march steadily across the lake, imposing as skyscrapers. Other times, gray curtains of cloud skim the water’s surface and the lake becomes a mirage. 

When I was growing up in Burlington, Vermont, this ever-changing view of the lake and mountains was my constant companion, readily visible from any of my vantage points in the city—bedroom window, middle school classroom, neighborhood playground. But it was on the beach at my grandmother’s camp at Colchester Point where I felt most at home. All I had to do was hop down a set of iron stairs and run along a narrow pathway to the beach, where an expanse of water, sky, and mountain invited me in.

For many of us who live on Lake Champlain’s shoreline, the stories we tell about ourselves become stories of this particular expanse of water. So much of my family’s conversation focuses on the deep orange of the sunset sky, the icy wind gusting off the lake, or the sapphire sparkles rippling the lake’s surface on a sunny day. While we appear to be discussing the weather or the scenery when we revel in the evening sky or bemoan the cold or exalt the shimmering water, what we are really talking about is ourselves—how we acknowledge both beauty and harshness, and how we know that simply looking at an expanse of blue can soften any pain. 

“This lake is in our bones,” my grandmother used to say. As I child, I never knew exactly what she meant, but as I sit here today, sand sifting through my fingers, cool water rinsing my toes, I feel how this place inhabits me. Memories ease in on the wind, animating the liminal places between reality and dream. 

Many of my fondest memories feature my grandmother and my father, the two people who most loved this shoreline. For my grandmother, the camp was her place to relax—she fished, rowed, swam, combed the beach for fossils, and grew sweet tomatoes, usually with me by her side. My father, conversely, saw her camp as something to improve, and tending to this place became his lifelong labor of love. He nurtured vibrant perennial gardens, added modern updates to our dwelling, shored up eroding embankments, and built epic fires in the never-ending process of beach cleanup, always trying to enlist me and my brothers to work with him. I preferred fishing at dawn and combing the beach in the late afternoon with my grandmother to shoveling stones and stacking driftwood with my father. 

Since the deaths of my grandmother and father over a decade ago, our camp is now rarely used, and my family is making plans to sell it. I make more visits now. I walk the beach, dream of myself as a child. I stand at a threshold.

My grandmother taught me to pierce the flesh of a juicy worm onto a metal hook and drop my handline over the edge of the aluminum rowboat into the depths of nothingness and wait. When I caught my first fish, I tiptoed with her up the three wooden steps behind the pharmacy counter where my grandfather worked and nearly burst as I waited for him to pour pills onto clean white marble, count them with several sweeps of a metal scraper, then herd them toward amber cylinders. In one shaking hand, I held my fish by the tail, a tiny yellow perch whose silver scales gleamed under fluorescent lighting. In the other, I gripped my wooden handline, wound with waxed string and dangling a row of tiny lead sinkers neatly stacked above a barbed hook. 

In the rowboat, my grandmother had lifted her black-rimmed cat-eye glasses, parked them on top of the plaid kerchief that held back her brown curls, carefully examined my perch, and smiled at me. 

“That,” she said, “will be one to remember.”

When my grandfather looked up from his work, his eyes danced with pride. 

My grandmother read the lake by ciphering the waves, how they rolled, lifted, and broke, how wind tousled and stirred them to change. She was well aware that a lightning storm never really kicked up out of nowhere. There were signs to be read: moisture in the breeze, a flip of poplar leaves, an almost imperceptible line of gray stretched across the Adirondacks. 

From the beach, she watched my grandfather pull the cord on the 15 horsepower Evinrude, white caps foaming as the boat bounced in the thickening waves. As we waited out the storm, my grandmother drummed her fingertips on the Formica tabletop in the camp kitchen.

“Let’s go,” she said sharply when the rain stopped. I followed her out to the patio behind the camp.

She lay a set of knives on the metal table. 

“You’re going to clean our fish.”

And so my grandmother taught me how to clean yellow perch. 

I had long dreamed of handling those knives. My grandmother kept them sequestered high on a closet shelf—blonde wood-handled knives with curved silver blades and sharp points. I had watched her clean and filet fish many times, but had never held the knives in my hands. She handed one to me, and when I felt the smooth wood cool the center of my palm, the trembling in my belly stopped. 

“Follow everything that I do,” she told me. “And do it slowly.”

The dark green stripes of the perch glistened as they lay on their sides in the large metal bucket. Single black eyes stared up at me. I submerged my free hand and grasped a fish between my thumb and forefinger. As if stroking a cat, I smoothed back the sharp dorsal fin and firmly clamped down on the gills. 

I drew the knife too lightly through the center of the belly, leaving a jagged line. I slid the knife under the gills, sliced off the head, and dropped it into the metal pail. Then I parted the belly and my grandmother took the hose and ran a stream of water over the fish, exposing a glistening heart, liver, and intestines. I scooped cold entrails onto the table, and she rinsed a stream of blood from the white metal table. 

I had seen my grandmother and grandfather clean many fish, and so the blood and scales on my hands, the feel of organs sliding through my fingers, and the bucket of heads felt familiar, right. This was the necessary preliminary to a lunch of fried perch or a dinner of my grandmother’s tomato fish chowder.

I looked up at my grandmother for approval.

“Turn the fish over,” she said, “and run your knife along either side of the backbone.”

We continued on as the wind and waves began to settle. 

Steam fogged the windows of the camp that evening as my grandmother stirred the perch chowder mixed with fresh tomatoes, potatoes, and sweet corn. The screen door on the porch creaked open and we heard my grandfather whistling Soussa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” his signature entry. My grandmother banged her wooden stirring spoon on the stovetop and stared straight ahead at the wall. Then she turned her head and lifted an eyebrow at me. 

Over hot soup, my grandfather told us how he had made it to an island to wait out the storm, and how later, the anchor had held him as he pulled and pulled at the cord and the motor refused to start. In a headwind, he had rowed the several miles back to our beach. 

“And, now,” he said, “I’m tired.”

My grandmother once told me she wanted to braid my hair on my wedding day. I held the image close, like a promise, as I slipped into my simple silk dress in a tiny cottage a few feet away from the lake. I could hear our guests beginning to convene. Storm clouds had been building all day, a wind was gusting, and I knew we would have a storm.

My future mother-in-law came into the cabin and rushed me along. 

“Quickly, dear,” she said to me, “Before it starts to rain.”

I left my hair loose and slipped into the white sandals Glynn had bought for me at a thrift shop three days earlier. They fit like Cinderella’s slipper. During the ceremony, our fathers read poems and blessings as the steady wind wrapped around us like a blanket. As we finished our vows, tiny raindrops began to fall, and as our guests followed us toward the white reception tent pitched on the edge of the lake, the sky opened and rain poured down. We ran toward shelter and I imagined the wind was my grandmother’s fingers, combing through my wet hair. 

It is the middle of January, and I walk with Glynn over thick shards of anchor ice on the shoreline. The temperature hovers near zero. A strong gale pushes black churning waves against the huge chunks of ice that look like shipwrecks. A bit of snow on top gives us traction and invites us to climb and explore. Frigid spray pricks our faces. Like prospectors, Glynn and I walk slowly in the subzero wind chill, examining the ice’s thickness and its opaque glass veneer. It is full of dizzying cracks and reflections of the burning sky. 

My father is dying, and we have left his hospital room to walk the winter beach and watch the sun go down. Tonight the winter sky explodes in long smooth bands of red. If it could speak, it would roar. We shake with cold, but cannot leave the winter shore and blazing sky until it is completely dark. Above the Adirondacks, a thin scarlet line of light seems determined to persist all night, or maybe forever. 

Back in the intensive care unit on the hospital’s fifth floor, we find my father asleep amid a beeping array of flashing screens. On a tray by his bed, a Dixie cup holds a tiny pink lake of melted strawberry ice cream, and next to it sits a flat wooden spoon. We stay for a while with him, and when I look out the window, I see that the ruby line of sunlight has vanished. I was with my grandmother when she died a few years earlier in a room on the same floor of this hospital, with the same view of the lake and mountains through her window. The expanse of the lake and the clear ridgelines comfort me.

My father dies the next day as snow falls hard. On a clear morning the next week, we stand by his grave in Lake View Cemetery, not far from my grandmother’s headstone. From his burial site, I can see the clean mirror of ice glazing the distance to the Adirondacks. The space and silence of the view soften my sadness.