My 79-year-old parents are recovering from a car accident. My dad insists it wasn't his fault. They were in the far left lane on Chicago's Lake Shore Drive when a car swerved into them, smashing them against the barrier and totaling their car. My mother has two purple knees and my dad has a swollen hand and whiplash but it could have been much worse. Despite their aches and pains, they drove up here to Vilas County in northern Wisconsin, to the cabin they come to every year.

My father came up here as a child. The view from Highway 70 is the same as it was back then, he says. I ask if they're the same trees; he says they're not.

I'm up here to relax, and to help them. I'll clean the cabin and pack the car the day we leave, and until then, keep my mother company while my father naps from his sleep-inducing pain medication. So far, he hasn't gone out in the boat once. He used to go out in early morning, when the haze lay on the lake like a gray wash of watercolor, muting the trees and sky. He'd stay out all morning and not come in until lunch.

Lunch in the cabin was, and still is, leftovers from dinner at a Northwoods supper club the night before, bits of rare prime rib and baked potato, or breaded fish from a fish fry, or pasta, or baked beans and potato salad from the grocery store's deli section, all packaged like live bait. I have to be careful when I open a white Styrofoam container. I could be dipping my fork in a clump of writhing earthworms instead of last night's spaghetti.

After lunch, my father used to go out in the boat again and not come in until dinner. Sometimes my mother went with him. Sometimes I'd row him around while he fished. If he went out alone, and it was a pretty day, he'd come back just before sunset and pick us up, for what we called the "Golden Moment," the time on the lake when the sun begins to set and the pine and birch trees turn golden, and dipping an oar into the water is like dipping it into molten gold.

Night falls quickly once the Golden Moment is over. We scrambled to get back to shore and unload the boat before darkness fell. My father always brought three times as many fishing poles as they were people in the boat, thus ensuring that he'd spend more time untangling lines than actually fishing. He never seemed to mind.

Years ago, he used to hire a fishing guide. I went with them a few times. My favorite part of the day was eating breakfast at a diner at dawn, the lake misty, the day young, its treasures not yet revealed.

Even without the guide, my father was always on the lookout for a Muskie, a huge ferocious fish a yard long. He kept a coke bottle in the bottom of the boat, for stunning them, he said. He told me he had relatives back in the twenties and thirties who kept a gun in the boat for shooting Muskies. I still don't know if he was kidding or telling the truth.

This year, he fishes from the pier and catches 24 fish in a row, all little ones, small perch, sunfish. The handyman at the resort says to kill them even if we aren't going to eat them. Too many fish in the lake, he says. My father doesn't have the heart. He throws them all back.

The moon is waxing big and orange tonight. We're not eating out; the pain medication has taken away my father's appetite and my mother and I are content with leftovers. We bring the Styrofoam containers out and sit at the table pushed to the edge of the screen porch. All three of us look across the lake, waiting for the Golden Moment.

I want to be out there, even though a cool wind has sprung up, a harbinger of fall. The osprey hunts for his dinner, soaring high above the lake, then spiraling down to snatch a fish. Over by the weeds, the great blue heron squawks and spreads his enormous wings. The eagle watches us from his nest in the tallest tree.

I want to be out there but I don't push it. Even before the accident, my father's become unsteady on his feet and I worry about him every time he goes out on the pier.

I think about doing yoga on the small beach and can't wait for the morning, when the lake is shrouded in mist and anything can happen. I love beginnings, not just early mornings, also the first steps of a journey, the opening credits of a movie, the first words set down on a page.

Something occurs to me here, watching the osprey and the heron and the pine trees live out their lives. I look at the fat orange moon, which will be full in two days and then begin to wane. Lives are not only made of beginnings.

Maybe the task ahead of me now is to learn to love endings.