This is the adventurous 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 and eager for life as ever. Ethel , The perfect foil for Norman, delights in all the small things that continue to enrich their long life together. They are visited by their divorced, middle-aged daughter and her dentist fiance who head off to Europe leaving behind his defiant teenage son who the couple take on as the grandson they never had.