IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, MY MOTHER, LOUISE, WOKE UP ABRUPTLY. Water was pouring onto her from above. She punched my father. He switched on the light, which was directly above my mother, took one look, and cried, “It’s raining in through the light fixture!” This happened one summer half a century ago, in what was then our homemade family cabin on Lake Burton, deep in the woods of the North Georgia mountains.
Closer inspection revealed rain leaking through a hole in the tin roof at another spot, creeping along the ceiling until it got to the light bulb, and then drizzling down. It was one of those things that happened at the lake. Once, our friend Mary Jo’s feet caught fire thanks to several jugs of water. Another time, my nephew Stuart woke up his parents to present himself coated with soot from head to toe (he’d been fiddling with a lantern in the night). Lake Burton was still semiwild back then, before weekend McMansions took over its shores. My father, Roy Sr., wanted to grow up to be a home builder, but his carpenter father, having been deprived of all work by the Great Depression, talked him out of it. My father did eventually enable families to build or anyway to own houses, by becoming a prominent savings and loan executive, back when that meant something along the lines of James Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life. And he did build that house on Lake Burton.
Burton is a beautiful lake, created in 1919 by the damming
