The store caters not to the locals but to parents dropping their kids off at one of the area camps, or visitors from Milwaukee who want to experience some idealized version of “the country.” They sell popcorn, heavily scented candles, ice cream, every kind of cheese she can imagine (she really is back in Wisconsin), refrigerator magnets shaped like cows, and massive lollipops. She loads up her cart with hundreds of dollars’ worth of cheese, summer sausage, and knickknacks and asks the girl at the register to ship it all to her office at the museum so that her colleagues can get a dose of exactly what they think Wisconsin is. Sherri is always extravagant with gifts.

Back in her car, she rolls down her windows to get some air. The August heat is oppressive. High temps are nothing new to her after living in the desert for so long; but she had forgotten about the Wisconsin humidity she’d once loved, and still does, even if it took some getting used to.

She turns onto Highway J and enters the eastern edge of East Troy. Everything she sees—the hills, railroad tracks, shrubbery, slouching barns, cornfields, farmhouses, churches, the sign for the Phantom Lake YMCA, even the rusty weather vanes—register inside her like pulled stops and depressed keys on the organ.

It is beautiful here—she hasn’t forgotten that, but she had forgotten how incredibly verdant and lush it is, the fields peppered with daisies, coneflowers, allium, and purple loosestrife, sandhill cranes standing in pairs in the fields, the hills gentle and rolling. A summer day in Wisconsin feels golden, buzzing with life and activity.

After the Lake Beulah Country Club golf course, she spies the open water of Mill Pond where the road is so close to the lake that there are no houses to block the view. The water is choppy from a motorboat whizzing past hauling a banana-shaped tube with a bunch of kids screaming with delight on the back. Don’t they know what could happen to them? Of course they don’t. Sherri looks out on the part of Mill Pond where Arthur died. Even after that awful tragedy, the lake still strikes Sherri as strangely benign, a thing to be enjoyed.

The bar across the street is packed. Sherri had walked over there once with Arthur to play bar dice. Motorcycles are lined up in the parking lot, and the tables on the deck are filled with people lounging in the sun and drinking beer out of giant plastic cups. A pair of cyclists in Lycra zoom past her. This was what summer should really feel like, treasured and fleeting, and approached with gusto. Here, because of the weather, everyone feels the need to pack an entire year into three months. It is nothing like Palm Springs, where the seasons all run together without the intense cycles of nostalgia, loss, or anticipation that come with the changes in the weather.