Ethel and Norman Thayer are returning to their summer home on Golden Pond for the forty-eighth year. He is a retired professor with heart palpitations and a failing memory, but still observant and eager for life. Ethel is ten years younger than Norman and delights in the small things that have enriched their long life together. Their middle-aged daughter and her dentist fiance visit before leaving for a trip to Europe leaving his teenage son behind for the summer. The boy becomes the "grandchild" the couple has never had and Norman enjoys teaching the boy how to fish and encourages him to read "good" books. Norman also learns a good bit of teenage slang in the process. As the summer wanes, so does their brief idyll, and in the final moments of the play, Norman and Ethyl are brought even closer together by the incident 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.