Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved Read Free

looked.”
    I invited her in again, to have a look, but again she refused. “No, no. I know you’re busy.”
    “Some other time?” I offered, and she looked right at me. In that moment, she was almost scary looking: her eyes froglike behind thick glasses, her mouth open, revealing her teeth—large, perfect, and I am pretty sure, all her own.
    “Very nice to meet you, Katie,” she said, immediately lengthening my name into its diminutive form. “I’ll bring down that picture some time.” The interview was over. She turned to walk up the overgrown path between the two houses. “Damn vines.” The thorns were catching on her dull beige stockings. “I just can’t keep up with them anymore.”*
    * IN THE YEARS since that first meeting, Barbara has become a friend and teacher. She gave me my first bird feeder, the first flowers for my garden, and a sense of my home’s history. Recently, she moved into a nursing home, and I have yet to grow used to the sight of her house, dark and empty on the hill. She is rarely lucid now, but she has left me with a deep appreciation of my hand-built home. It is a simple floor plan. You enter through the front door straight into the living room; to your left is a brick fireplace; to your right, a triple window takes up the entire wall. From the living room you move into the kitchen, with the bathroom tucked off to the side. The bedroom is behind the kitchen. It’s a pretty big room, with windows on the three exterior walls. If you move back into the kitchen, and take a left, you can step through an extra-wide door onto the slate patio. Tucked in against the house, the herb garden thrives in afternoon sun, and the beach roses planted on the hillside scent the air with th fragrance of vanilla and cloves.
    What is wonderful about my house is the way the light moves through the many windows I imagine Barbara’s mother instructing her husband to install. In three rooms and a bathroom, she planned thirteen windows, and she planned them in just the right places. The sun rises in the eastern corner of the bedroom, and the light moves around the house as the day progresses. The long southern exposure means that there is daylight in all the rooms all afternoon, until the sun sets in the western corner of the living room. The moon, too, shines into the house. In the wintertime, when the trees are bare and the moon is full, I sometimes have to pull my bedroom blinds, blocking out the silvery light bright enough to make a shadow of the windowpanes on the floorboards. Or there will be no hope of sleep.
    It is because the elder Mrs. Dowe lived next door that she could plan this perfect play of light and day and night. She and her builder-husband knew how to situate the cottage on the land because they knew the land. I never met her; she died a longtime widow, somewhere in her nineties, the first year I was here, the spring before her daughter came down the path to introduce herself.*
    * I AM LISTENING for the squeak of the hinge on the black metal mailbox that is mounted to the right of my front door. It’s Wednesday again, and I await the arrival of the
Pennysaver
. I find I have been thinking about those cottages for sale. Thinking: Maybe I’ll call that number. Maybe I’ll do a little bit of investigation. For while it is true that I was not seeking a cottage when I saw that listing last week, I am always seeking more space. A place to put my office that is not my bedroom. A place to put the fax machine that is not my kitchen counter. But when I comb the
Pennysaver
today, I find no listing. No cottages for sale. No cottages to be moved.
    Is it the story I am already inventing of the sad little cottages, abandoned in the name of progress, waiting patiently to be adopted, that drives me to scour the
Pennysaver
again the following week? Or is it the sense I may have missed an opportunity? I’m not sure, but I realize that the cottages have come to live in my mind, that I find myself wondering