Place has always been important to me. In 1998 I wrote a column for The New York Times about a swim club called Fernwood, which held a special place in my heart. Of all the columns I wrote in my five years at the Jersey column, this is the one people mentioned most. It’s easy to take favorite places for granted.  But when they’re gone, it’s like a death…

Here are the first few graphs. 

NEW JERSEY; Less Than a Country Club, but Much More

By DEBRA GALANT

EVERYTHING has its season and now that the children are tucked away in school, we have finally re-entered the Season of Productivity.

Although I spent half of August yearning for this, I now see that I should have been enjoying every last drop of the Season of Idle Lounging at my favorite idle lounging spot, Fernwood Country Club in Roseland, in what may have been its final season.

I would be lying if I described Fernwood — which is as much a country club as I am a supermodel — as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But I would not be misrepresenting things if I described it as one of the wonders of my world. My husband and I have been describing it for years as feeling like a tired Catskills hotel, comfortable but down on its luck.

In fact, it was originally built as a fresh-air camp for children and mothers from Newark. It is a place of grass and trees, sagging lounge chairs and ramshackle white buildings, a place so relaxed that the tennis courts often have large cracks with weeds poking out, and buckets of patching tar spend the season watching every game from the sidelines.

It is the place where both of my children learned to swim, and where paperbacks and the papers usually go unread in favor of endless conversations. It is a place so homey that even on the first day of summer none of us feels the least bit self-conscious about the overabundance of pallid flesh.

You can read the rest in the New York Times archives.

— Debbie Galant