The Cottage

All of the trinkets, all of the sayings on the wall that I was once too young to read, all of the tattered children's books tucked on shelves, coloring books tucked in drawers, animal sculls stuck on wreaths, little notes and ancient photos... they're all. still. here.  The slightly sandy carpet and the flowered chairs, the hats hanging in the front bathroom, all of which we promptly tried on. The driftwood - all the driftwood in it's tangled shapes, with it's ponderous facial expressions.  I'm taken so far back - farther back than I've gone in a while.  And they are all of a sudden still here too.  On the white chairs, sitting on the beach, laughing together and waiting for us all to swim back from the second sandbar.  

I walked around in the dusk light trying to find her memory stone under the brush, kicking leaves aside with my feet.  Panicky after a while, like in a bad dream where the light was quickly fading, I eventually found it had been moved years ago when the old piece of property was sold.  Now it's near the swing set, where we used to give each other underdogs and try to make it all the way around the pole.  When I found it, Weston walked over, set one of the little ceramic angels upright, and put his arms around me.  When I found it, I felt better. 

We ate Jack's pizza, drank beers from Central Waters Brewery, listened to Fleetwood Mac on the portable CD player, and read from the 1998 New Yorker Cartoon book.  He said that he realized why I like 70's-style decor so much.  I smiled.  He talked about how he appreciated Lake Michigan a little more than he ever has.  Here, you have to give the lake some attention.  Here, like on an ocean, you have to slow down and look at everything.  The dune grass, the wicker cups in the cabinets, the made bunkbeds.  Everything.

Farewell to the Animal House

We first moved in to the 120-year-old red stone house in January, the acre lawn in front of it white with snow.  To welcome us, the steam radiators banged, hissed, and clanged.  The basement, dark and dank, seemed to breathe upward into the house.  Faded orange and green wallpaper from the 1940’s led through the foyer and up the spiral staircase into the second floor.  Nobody had lived here for at least a year.  The rooms echoed as we placed boxes in them, books in the dining room, paintings in the living room, a few pots and pans in the pantry.  Upstairs, we couldn’t decide which of the three rooms to sleep in. There were too many rooms to fill up with our few belongings, but the house filled up soon enough on its own.  

The first time I did laundry in the basement, as I fished the last pair of socks and boxers from the bottom of the washing machine, I found a dead bat, wet and clean and folded peacefully among our clothes.  Another one appeared in a bag of salt for the driveway, and a few more, these ones very alive, could be heard making love under our staircase while we ate dinner.  

The expected spider here and there reminded us of the house’s age, and of our location under tall trees and vast stretches of grass.  The cold feeling and slight awareness of ghosts began accompanying me as I placed the dishes into the cabinets.  I assumed that in a house this old, there must be visitors from the afterworld, and I found them rather friendly.  Invisible company while I was alone for hours on end in this quiet winter in this enormous house.

When the weather started to get warmer, the ants arrived.  We came downstairs to thousands of them, following one another in perfect lines, coming from holes in the walls we hadn’t noticed before, across the kitchen floor, up the sides of the cupboards, in the deep sink.  So, we cleaned up all of our crumbs and wiped down all of our countertops, and crossed our fingers.  The next morning, the sun shone on even more thin black lines, moving quickly and criss-crossing the white surfaces of the kitchen.  Eventually, we busted them all with boric acid, but now our kitchen seems so … empty. 

And then, the animals we became, when a spring thunderstorm would wrap itself around us, wet, loud and crashing.  When we were slowly surrounded by night and darkness, when we were slowly surrounded by our own beasts, crawling out from within, our real selves falling to pieces like shedding fur or molted skin.  At times, it was like looking into a mirror side by side, finally seeing our reflections.  Those times are gone now.  They were necessary, to tuck into the pockets of our relationship, to read in past diaries when we’re older.

With the onset of summer came our next guest: the woodchuck.  Weston found him under the front porch while gardening in the yard. He aptly named him Woody, and though I have never seen him, and fear the Dickens might be scared right out of me if I do, I know he’s still there, drinking last sips from empty PBR cans behind the lattice and watching out for intruders.    

Amber dropped the kittens off for a weekend while she was away.  One black one, Lucy, and one gray one, Charlie.  Someone else apparently named them after my cousins.  We tried to contain them in the library, a big space they could roam and play and read Harry Potter at their leisure.  Within a half hour, though, they escaped, wanting desperately to be near us, wanting desperately to explore.  Attacking one another every chance they got.  Attacking our noses with the smell of their litter box.

And finally, as we begin to take down the maps from the walls, fill boxes with books, and look around at the traces of the life that we’ve had here, we had one last four-legged guest.  We arrived home one Sunday evening to a rabbit, lounging in our living room.  I didn’t believe Weston when he told me, but then I heard the skittering of paws on our hallway floor, and found tiny bits of scat all around the house.  A trail of where he’d been all day, depositing little hints that he’d been in the pantry, the kitchen, on the couch, down the stairs of the basement.  We got him out the humane way, through the cellar door back into wild world where he belongs, with all the other animals that might eventually knock on these doors or slip through the cracks in the inviting walls.  Unfortunately, we won’t be here to greet them.

Ancient Footskin

It happened on a Saturday in June, about 2:00pm, on a strawberry farm in Fairfax, Vermont.  Weston and I had been commissioned to help our friend Corbett scrape, chisel, and brush at an archaeological dig site he and some of his students have been working on for the last 2 years.  Corbett's girlfriend, Maggie, and their dog Josie had come along too. They had found three fire pits among fields of Swiss chard and romaine, buried 2 feet below the worked soil.  They knew the pits belonged to the Abenaki tribes, and they knew the last of the coals of the fires had gone out nearly 2,000 years ago, right around the turn of the first millennium. 

We knelt barefoot next to one of the pits, dug out in a perfect square (3 feet by 3 feet in diameter), methodically scraping the top of the mud - or "Chocolate" as Corbett called it - until we got to black.  Black being the coal, the coal being the remnants of a meal cooked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago.  We scraped while Corbett told us the history of the world, as slowly and as meticulously as our blades were moving across the ancient ground.  He started with 4,000 BC, ("When there were two miles of ice over our heads"), and went from there, in what seemed like 10  year increments.  As the afternoon sun beat down on my back, my sweat dripped into the pit, and I was fascinated at how much modern man knew, and also at how much we still don't know.  Here, we were looking for bits of discarded seeds or animal bones or tools that might tell us more about the lives of the original people of Vermont, back when there weren't state lines or political leanings or the Kardashians.  Just food, shelter, and survival. 

I took a break when there was a pause in the story of our earth's history (probably around 400 BC), and went behind Corbett's truck to pee.  Josie was happy to have the company; she had been tied up to the truck all afternoon.  When I started walking back through the fields to the pit, Maggie let out a piercing squeal.  I watched as everyone gathered around to see what she had sifted out of the soil.  Corbett looked fascinated, pulling and tugging on something small in his hands.  When I finally returned to the site, they had gone back to work. 

"It looked like someone had left a thumb print," Maggie told me, excited. "It was the perfect cut-out."  After being significantly grossed out, the archaeologists tossed the piece of skin into the lettuce rows, surely shaken by the strangeness of the find.  Corbett told us that if they found any part of a homo sapien, they'd have to pack up their shovels and go home.  It's illegal to dig on Native American burial grounds.  Things were quiet for the rest of the afternoon.  Though we hadn't found a scull or a recognizable human remain, we still felt a blanket of silence come over us as we realized that real people, people with forefingers and thumbs, actually existed here, so long ago.

We drove home after a couple of hours with dirt stuck in all of our pores and redness from the sun spreading across our shoulders.  We ate strawberries that we had picked and listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, not talking much still. When we got home, I took a shower right away to wash the grime from off my hands and my feet, barely able to stand from exhaustion.  I had to sit on the edge of the tub to wash my feet, and as I scrubbed I felt something odd and looked down.  On the ball of my foot, there was a perfect circle missing just below my big toe.  An old blister from a few weeks ago.  A new artifact, tossed into the romaine leaves. 

Gator Jerky

We took the day off from Disney World, traded amusement parks for a State Park: from 4D ride to canoe.  At Wekiwa Springs, we were on the look out for wildlife.  Alligators, specifically.  As we paddled slowly along the river, canopied in Spanish moss, we saw mangy swamp birds, mating dragonflies, bullfrogs, red-bellied cooters, and loud Memorial Day revelers, but no gators.  When the rain began to fill our vessel we decided to turn upstream and drive back to Orlando. 

Just before Kissimmee, on Route 4, we passed two hand-written signs that shouted “GATOR JERKY” in big, bold capitals.  We figured if we couldn’t see them in the wild, the least we could do was eat them.  We pulled over to the side of the highway where a rusty blue pickup truck had parked, ass-out, under an overpass.  Rainbow-striped umbrellas gave the contents of the bed shade, and a woman with a few teeth missing grinned at us as we approached, cars zooming past.  She offered us a sample of the jerky right away, knowing that this was why we were here: two pasty tourists looking for an off-the-beaten-path Florida experience.  I was afraid to try it, so I stalled by asking how they caught the gators.  Weston was already munching.

“His uncle does it.” She pointed behind her at a man sitting with his tattooed legs dangling out the passenger door.  He was smoking a fat cigar.  “We give him a six pack of beer, he takes his airboat out on the St. John River, gets drunk, and comes back with ‘em.”  I took a bite, and it tasted, well, like jerky.  “I don’t get involved with the process,” she flashes her half empty smile again.  “I just sell it.”  She offered us a package – a Ziploc of jerky and a watermelon, but we told her we were just here for the meat.  I handed her a ten-dollar bill and we kicked dust back onto the highway.

Feeling good, like we had had an authentic gator experience, we munched on the jerky and turned up the base-heavy Cuban tunes on the radio.  A few bites in, Weston turned to me.  “This is beef jerky.”  Sure enough, it was a waxy, dark, salty meat straight out of a convenient store bag and repackaged for our willingness and gullibility. 

Weston immediately called the Kissimmee police to report the crime, not about to get jerked around.  I kept eating it.