14 Willow Lane, Monticello, NY 12701

By the second summer you'll stop noticing that you're doing it, the walk down to Melody Lake after dinner with the light going gold across the water. It becomes ordinary the way the best things eventually do. The lake runs 18 acres, set back in the woods and quiet enough that it never fills with strangers, and the stream that runs out of it comes down past the back of this lot, so on the nights you leave the windows open you fall asleep to moving water. The road ends a few houses past this one, so the engines you hear belong to people who are already home. The lake keeps the calendar. April announces itself with peepers loud enough to hear through a closed window, and you'll open it anyway just to let them in. Through July the water stays warm and unbothered. September lights the ridge and the lake holds every bit of that color upside down for a month. Then the snow comes and everything goes so still that the quiet stops feeling like an absence and turns into the thing you spend all...