The screen doors at MaMa Brown's house closed with a satisfying "thwat." Not a higher-pitched slap that might speak of tight hinges and new wood, but a low, soft meeting of well-worn parts that didn't work any harder in the hazy Texas heat than they had to.

That, for me, is the sound of summer. That, and the droning of the house's lone air conditioner. When the August afternoons got too hot, MaMa would go lie down in her bedroom, and the sound of her window unit came through all the open windows and doors ventilating the rest of the turn-of-the-century cottage.

Those same cross breezes carried the smells of MaMa's mouth-watering fried chicken and painfully sweet jam cake. Those are the memories of summer weeks we used to spend at my maternal grandmother's house. Granny, my dad's mom, lived near us in Kansas City, but to see MaMa, we had to spend a day driving down to east Texas.

My children will remember different sounds and sights and tastes from their summer trips.

At least I hope they'll remember. It's been a while. These days, when it comes to vacations, we are a family adrift.

For a decade, we spent two weeks of every summer at a South Carolina beach house. I started taking the kids down there almost as soon as my parents became one of the dozen families that co-owned it, back in the early '90s, before my third child was even born.

It was a modest place -- an old, decidedly un-swanky ranch house on the increasingly upscale Hilton Head Island -- the kind of house where you could ride your bicycle through the front door and park it in the living room, or sit with wet swim suits on the three mismatched sofas.

We loved it -- murky Atlantic water, menacing jellyfish and all. Three generations of Daileys gathered there every July -- and often for Thanksgiving and a week in February, too. There was no jam cake, but my mom's chicken is as good as her mom's was, and my kids would've had it for every meal if possible.

We built sandcastles and got unhealthily tan. We rented bicycles and went miniature golfing and fed the ducks at the Coligny Circle pond. We did everything and nothing for two blissful weeks in the sun.

Then a few years ago, the shareholders decided to sell. Like my parents, they were well into their 70s, and their grandchildren, a few years older than those in our family, were less available for extended family vacations.

The house was nearly the last old one left on the island, and its two-lot width had long had local real estate developers salivating.

It was time.

The house was torn down within days of the sale. Weeks later my parents visited the site, a detour from another of their regular road trips, and two McMansions were going up in its place. The scraggly trees that were easy for the kids to climb and just tall enough to keep them hidden from our sight -- those are gone.

It's all gone except what remains in our minds.

The shareholders' handsome profit made the end of this era bittersweet. We're happy to see our parents' and friends' good fortune bring them such relief, especially when their investment gave us so much for so many years. But we're saddened by the end of something wonderful and frustrated by our failure to come up with a decent replacement.

We tried a cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains but realized we want to be near water. We tried to rent a beach house near the one we'd lost, but the effort fizzled when we couldn't get everyone together in the same week.

One branch of the family has just moved to California, and my kids are all teenagers now, their summers filled with sports and jobs and time with their friends.

That's a little how things went when I was the teenager. We'd gone to Texas almost every summer for years to visit MaMa and Aunt Lois, driving down on a Monday and heading home on Saturday in a car crammed full of Texas roses, bought for $2 a dozen at roadside stands.

But the trips tapered off. As we neared adulthood, only my Mom would travel south to visit. When MaMa died, I was in my mid-20s and hadn't seen her in nearly a decade. It had been too long.

We're still talking about a new place to make our own, to gather all the family once a year before our kids get too old. It doesn't have to be anything grand. I'd just like something with a good, old screen door.