There’s something about an old lake house.

When I walk into Randy Olson’s cottage in Lakewood, there’s a bunch of long waders hanging from a hook, mismatched furniture collected over generations, an old stove in the kitchen.

There’s a collection of fishing poles leaning against a wall, and in some old drawer, packets of pictures that boast of big fish caught over many decades.

There’s shoes left at the door, old cups in the kitchen, someone’s quilt on the couch, a picnic table on the enclosed porch that faces the water, and it’s draped in a vinyl tablecloth.

It’s a classic lake cottage and Randy Olson loves it.

It tells his story — a story about a family who’s lived in every crack, every cupboard and every floorboard for so long that you’ll never wash the family out of the house. They’re inseparable now — history and structure forever intertwined.

His grandparents bought the place when his father was a teenager — in September of 1949 If you want the date, just about the time the Korean War was starting.

After Randy’s dad graduated from high school, he got a job at MRC Bearings in Jamestown, but he’d only work a year before being drafted into the war where he’d spend most of his time in Japan unloading ammunition from American ships.

When his dad took the train home from Fort Dix after he’d served his time, the conductor wouldn’t let him off in Westfield and instead lugged him all the way up the tracks to Buffalo.

He took a cab home and then knocked on the back door of this cottage at 3 in the morning.

Because of the hour, his father answered the door with a gun, and there was his son standing in uniform.

“Viva,” he yelled up the stairs to his wife, “your son is home.”

Randy’s dad went back to work at MRC and eventually bought a house in Jamestown, but the grandparents stayed in that cottage for the rest of their lives.

And this is where Randy comes in.

Growing up, he’d spend every free minute at that house. That’s where Sunday dinner was, where Christmas was, and the fishing boat he got to pilot, and all the lake friends and cousins. That house was the receptacle for his boyhood dreams, and the place where he felt safe and where his grandparents were always happy to see him.

He’d take the bus to the cottage before he could ride his bike there. He’d spend weekends and vacations and just about any time he could.

It might be that certain people love a house more than others in a family — the memories are so powerful for them, the summer days so well lived and stored away in the heart, the pull to that place so strong that a lifetime later, there they are, still cracking open the screen door and sipping that first cup of coffee at the picnic table. They’re just a little older now, that’s all. And the porch might sag a little more. But the feelings remain the same.

When he was a kid traipsing around the lakefront, his family nicknamed him “dynamite,” because he was always running from one thing to the next at one hundred miles an hour.

He also tied a few firecrackers to inanimate objects-like a rock or a bait pail — just to see what would happen. Maybe that’s where the nickname came from.

Randy and his cousin own the place now and they’re getting ready to legally pass it along to their own children; a lot of thought must be centered on the house’s perpetuity.

But over his lifetime, Randy has become the wise lake guy, coaching nearby renters on how to handle their boats on the water or telling them which way they should tie it up — stern first or bow first toward the wind?

And he’s the guy you seek out to ask lake questions of — about fishing lures and musky habits and bats in the attic and seaweed stories.

He shows me a picture of him and his son taking a dock apart in high waters during a storm. Randy and his son are much younger in the picture but they are standing in the water in front of the same old house.

And I get to thinking about that — how a house will witness the coming and going of a family’s generations like a quiet historian. They watch us age and change and fade away.

But it seems to me memories become a part of a place — something you can feel. A man in a uniform, a boy in a boat, a blasted bait pail –part of that old lake house forever.