The Cottage Chronicles
I awoke this morning to the spiked squeals of my Chihuahua, Jack. He was sitting beside me on the bed, his front leg oddly up, in a twisted shape. Immediately I saw that his dew claw was hooked inside the tiny ring on his collar that held his tags. He cried out, jerked back when I made a move to unhook the claw. I got quickly out of bed, found scissors, and released the claw by cutting off the collar. All gone and tears dried. I went into my office and checked a website someone gave me to fix and I saw evidence of a Pharma hack, an obnoxious, if commonplace, bit of trickery.
Moments later, when I let Jack out back, I noticed a 3-legged squirrel sitting in my dogwood tree, chattering above the big tarp that covers the hole in the ground where my cracked main drain still awaited a plumber. The squirrel appeared to be cackling at me, its little mouth snapping up and down, insistently. I concluded that either I was hallucinating or receiving a type of message––something perhaps from the spirit world––maybe even a communication from some dead ancestor or this: A warning of something else I would prefer not to experience.
Jack and I then walked a short distance; minus his collar, I carried him. He stared up. When we stepped back inside the house, I noticed that the rooms were noticeably chilly and that my thermostat registered sixty-six degrees. Odd. I kept it at seventy-two. After the HVAC man arrived and climbed down into the musty old root cellar (always fondly classified as the basement) he said that the furnace's “B-Vent” had been installed upside down and that I needed a new “inducer motor.” He explained that upside-down, the B-Vent had been letting in rain and the motor's "squirrel-wheel" was now so rusted that it couldn't turn anymore. I mused: Was this the message from the squirrel?
I asked to see the motor and he showed me the motor, a contraption the size of a large tin can. Looking inside, I saw a clutter of grubby metal blades. An image formed in my mind of Wallace's teeth––Wallace of the Wallace and Gromit claymations. Obviously, Wallace's teeth were now sadly broken, yet years before, in his heyday, they were of course lustrous beauties, each one laid properly in place.
In May, my partner of twenty-five years left our house––our cherished, one-hundred-and fifteen-year-old cottage––and moved up north to be with her sister. “Enmeshment,” my therapist said, “with a capital E.” Our relationship was at last asunder. I think it was good for many years but then it went bad. She did not like it here. That could not be undone. Since then, we don't talk.
Life. No one told me.
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Lately, in the murk of evening's settling dark, I sit in a wicker chair in front of the high screen window and watch outside, how the dark wind sweeps the autumn leaves, and the thin branches of the trees tremble, nervous-like, forming stick figures across the deep cerulean sky. Part way back is a fence. The top half flutters in the night shade, basically making for a washed-out tint of sepia, waving in the gusts, hurrying in the pale-yellow light distantly cast from the neighbor’s side porch. I like to imagine Caddy by the fence with Benjy, whom she loves. Always, Luster will be nearby, looking for his quarter.
I am a Southerner, which doesn’t always count for much. But we have this, our literature, which belongs to us and not the others. Jack fits himself beside me in the chair, lays his sweet self down in the cool margin of my body. I sip some bourbon and wash it back with ice water. You don't need spoken words to fill a silence.
THE END