This spring, a ramshackle house with cigarette-stained ceilings will go on the market in Falmouth, Massachusetts, a middle-class resort town on the back shoulder of Cape Cod. Enterprising realtors will find it set back from the road on a steep hill rolling down to a kettlehole pond and deem it a fixer-upper. That is a euphemism for tearing it down and building something larger, an air-conditioned summer palace without such a convoluted floorplan. The old house will endure, however, in my memory.

In that house, my grandparents lived the last 25 years of their lives, and in the summers when I was young, before sleepaway camp and my grandfather’s first heart attack, I would live there too, with my mother and sister. I owned neither a phone nor a watch, but bathing suits and books were always close at hand. My grandfather taught me how to grill, my grandmother how to jigsaw and crossword. We spent weeks there, visited by a rotating cast of friends and relations, including my father, who came down from the city most weekends. Whoever was at the house would gather for dinner around the hewn-wood farmer’s table in the kitchen more nights than not. The meals were simple, local and familiar: my grandmother’s meatloaf, macaroni salad, plenty of cod, corn on the cob, burgers and sausages. On special occasions, we’d wrap the table in........

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