Save this story for later. In your story “Old Babes in the Wood,” two elderly sisters spend time at a family cottage by a lake—a place they’ve been visiting since their father built it when they were children. Did you have a particular cottage in mind while writing this? Photograph by Bernd Thissen / Shutterstock Yes, it’s a real place, or places. I’ve spent a lot of time in various locations in the northern boreal forest, and, like the cabin in the story, they all had sand and hand pumps. These were not originally summer cottages, however. My family lived in the boreal forest for two-thirds of every year, from before ice breakup until snowfall and freeze-up. My father was, at that time, a field biologist, and these places were isolated and did not have electricity. The structures themselves were built with hand tools.