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 many kids in school were named Anne.

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. Below us lived another Ann, who said she didn’t need an “e” in her name. We were shocked by that, of course, and did not believe her for a second.

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

Next time I walk around Lake Anne, I’ll be thinking about her.