ABSTRACT
T he early vacations I spent with my mother at Marjorie’s cottage on the beach in Westport, Connecticut, had started my interest in swimming and sailing, and Dorothy shared these
interests. Later, when Marjorie wanted to give up care of her cottage, she sold it to Dorothy, which made it possible for us to use the cottage freely in the summers, and for a couple of summers we drove east with our daughters to spend a month there. But soon we wanted an escape that was much closer to home, which led us to think of the Indiana Dunes on the south shore of Lake Michigan, about an hour’s drive from the South Side of Chicago. We investigated buying a cottage there; the first one we considered was a house right on the beach, between the lake and the lakefront road, in Beverly Shores. But we could not negotiate acceptable terms with the owner, so we gave up. Two years later, the lake level rose considerably, and the house was washed away in a storm. Happily, it did not carry with it our invested money.
