Cottage Daze Read Free

built a simple trap, a light linen cloth over a smooth-sided bucket and a cracker slathered with peanut butter for bait. Mouse, tea towel, and cracker fell into the bucket — where I found the rodent and the cloth in the morning.
    â€œNow what?” asked my dad.
    â€œI’ll let him go outside,” I said.
    â€œHe’ll get back in.”
    â€œI’ll take him to the other side of the island.”
    â€œHe has discovered easy food. He will find his way back.”
    â€œDo I have to drown him?”
    Hey, I was a sensitive kid. I paddled the one-mile stretch of water to the mainland in my canoe, a white garbage bucket in the bow. I set the mouse free. Perhaps a hawk or garter snake found him, but I felt quite pleased with myself. My dad teased me, not being able to face the facts of nature. “Outside, they are left alone,” he would say. “But once our space has been invaded, they have to go.”
    It is with great trepidation that we head to the cabin each spring, to open the cottage for another season. What mouse treats will be left behind? What wanton acts of vandalism or destruction? What careless mistakes did we make when closing the cottage last fall?
    One year a box of spaghetti had been left behind, and the mice had broken each individual noodle into tidy one-inch pieces. These they stored in various caches throughout the cabin, including inside the oven mitts that hung on the side of the stove. Another year it was a bar of soap, left by the sink, that was chewed and shaved into a thousand slivers, leaving us with the freshest smelling rodents on the lake.
    This year, Grandma is annoyed that someone has stolen the laces out of her old, comfortable camp shoes — though nobody will admit to needing a piece of string. We find the thieves when we separate the box spring and mattress in the back bedroom. The laces are there, still in one piece, wound gently around the lip of a downy mouse nest, like garland around a Christmas wreath. Mouse mom and mouse babies stare up in innocence. The children find them cute — our youngest asks to keep one, wanting to name him Stuart Little. The war is at a truce.
    With the grandchildren and Grandma keeping a stern watch, and I, for my part, grinning a silly smile that hinges on a thirty-some-year-old cottage memory, off goes Grandpa in the boat to shore, with a family of mice gently stowed with their nest in a bucket at the bow.
    Hello, World!
    My dad would wander out on the front porch of the cottage and shout out, “Hello, world!” at the top of his lungs. The bellow would break the silence of a summer’s evening and echo across the still lake waters. I am not sure if anyone across on shore ever heard him, but they certainly didn’t bother to holler back with, “Hello, Mr. Ross.” Maybe they just heard it and muttered amongst themselves, “There’s that lunatic again.”
    We would have just finished up our dinner when he’d get up and step outside to let go with his familiar salutation. Or we might be playing a family board game on the big pine harvest table in the evening when he would head out to the loo, pausing on the porch to shout.
    Sometimes we kids would have settled in for the night in the boathouse bunkie. We would be telling ghost stories or shining our flashlights around on the ceiling like spotlights. We would be giggling and talking and, sometimes, we would be getting yelled at to “be quiet and get to sleep and quit wasting the batteries in the flashlights!” — much the same things we chastise our kids for now. When we had settled down and were drifting off to a sweet sleep, lulled by the sounds of waves lapping on shore, the wind in the trees, or the distant call of a loon, comforted even by the sounds of adult voices and laughter coming from the cottage — suddenly the front door of the cabin would swing open and we would hear the familiar refrain, “Hello,