I can’t remember when it dawned on me that most people named Anne are not spring chickens. For a while “Anne” seemed to be the air I breathed. My grandmother was Ann — without an e, a travesty my mother corrected when she named me — and classmates (and their mothers) were also named Anne. It also made a handy middle name.

When I shared an apartment after college, it was with my friend Anne. We lived on the second floor of a house in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. Below us lived another Ann, who said she didn’t need an “e” in her name. We pretended to be shocked by that, but of course did not believe her for a second. Every Anne needed an “e,” as far as we were concerned.

Funny … I didn’t intend this post to be about Annes, only about Lake Anne, which I walked around yesterday. It’s named for Reston founder Robert E. Simon’s then wife, Anne Wertheim Simon. She was a writer who penned articles for McCall’s, where I was an editor, and her sister was historian and author Barbara Tuchman.

Next time I walk around Lake Anne, I’ll be thinking about Anne Simon, the namesake of this charming body of water.