After many years, a nostalgic man returns to a childhood vacation in an attempt to relive his memories with his son. Upon arriving, the lake seems untouched by time, but the small changes of the modern age did not live up to his idealized expectations. Through his son, he notices his childhood paradise has been altered and realizes the passing of his youth. In “Once More to the Lake” E.B. White’s descriptive visual imagery reflects both the continuity and changes of his childhood retreat. Through an assortment of vivid images, White paints the lake the “same as he left it" in nostalgic and reverence. With phrases such as “hills that the sun set behind” and the “cool and motionless” lake, White establishes a portrait of the beauty of an unchanging nature. His metaphor of comparing the lake to the “stillness of a cathedral” arrested time in his childhood utopia. The writer is convinced that “there had been no years [passed]” when he takes his son fishing, similar to how his father did. When he lowered the tip of his fishing rod “into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised,” White asserts that “everything was as it always been, that the years were a mirage.” However, as White begins comparing his memories to his experience of revisiting the lake with his son, he confronts multiple changes. For example, walking with his son through the “teeming, dusty field,” White notices “the middle track was missing.” The absence of the “marks of hooves and the splotches of dried flaky manure” represents a memory the writer can no longer relive. White is also sentimental about the changes in transportation, missing the “long ten-mile haul” on a wagon and “catching the first view of a lake after eleven months.” The lack of imagery to describe “parking [a car] under a tree… [and taking] the bags out in five minutes,” depicts White’s