This is the love story of Ethel and Norman Thayer, who are returning to  their summer home on Golden Pond for the forty-eighth year. He is a  retired professor, nearing eighty, with heart palpitations and a failing  memory—but still as tart-tongued, observant and eager for life as ever.  Ethel, ten years younger, and the perfect foil for Norman, delights in  all the small things that have enriched and continue to enrich their  long life together. They are visited by their divorced, middle-aged  daughter and her dentist fiancé, who then go off to Europe, leaving his  teenage son behind for the summer. The boy quickly becomes the  "grandchild" the elderly couple have longed for, and as Norman revels in  taking his ward fishing and thrusting good books at him, he also learns  some lessons about modern teenage awareness—and slang—in return. In the  end, as the summer wanes, so does their brief idyll, and in the final,  deeply moving moments of the play, Norman and Ethel are brought even  closer together by the incidence of a mild heart attack. Time, they  know, is now against them, but the years have been good and, perhaps,  another summer on Golden Pond still awaits.