Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved Read Free Page A

if they are still for sale, if I could find them, and if one would fit my circumstances and my site plan. And I find myself sharing my classified curiosity with Ed, a retired firefighter who is a working builder. Ed and I are almost-relatives of the blended family variety. He’s someone you trust the moment you meet him, the moment you feel the warmth in his eyes and the good humor in his soul. “Am I crazy to think of moving a cottage and attaching it to my house?” I ask when I see him on Christmas Day.
    “Not at all,” he says, and I think he is being generous in the face of a theoretical possibility. But he continues. “I think I know where those cottages are—or some cottages for sale, anyway. They’re just down the street. You ought to go have a look.” I am tempted to depart the gathering at once, to follow Ed’s directions to my classified destiny. But dinner is served, and the sun sets on those cottages just down the street.
    “You don’t think I’m crazy?” I confirm with Ed before we say good-bye. He smiles and his blue eyes twinkle in response. “I’m going to go see those cottages tomorrow,” I tell him.
    “You do that,” he says, “and let me know.”
    “What cottages?” my mother asks, as soon as we are in the car. I tell her about the ad in the
Pennysaver,
about my conversation with Ed. “And what would you do with a cottage?”
    “Attach it to my house—as an addition. Put my office in it.”
    “Now that’s a good idea. Maybe I could get one too.” My mom’s house is even smaller than my place, another Cape Cod cottage turned year-round residence. She downsized a few years back, and her furniture and possessions are still in the process of adapting. Case in point: the one hundred-plus versions of Santa Claus who surround us now as we open gifts in her tiny living room.
    “You could use an addition just for all these Santas,” I say.
    “You don’t like them?”
    That’s a tough one. I like my surfaces clear, perhaps a generational response to my mother’s tendencies in the opposite direction. It isn’t that I don’t like the Santa display, but I am less than comfortable sitting amidst all these white-haired men—thin Father Christmas Santas and round jelly-belly Santas; Santas dressed in red, blue, green, and even in black leather; the Harley Santa my mother bought last year and gave to me, without realizing he was dressed like a biker. I found him exceedingly creepy. My mother agreed that on his own, he was a little much. She happily adopted him into her fold, where his bad-boy vibe helps balance out all the good-natured Santas in the room.
    “Well, it isn’t that I don’t like the Santas, per se. But there are an awful lot of them. They make me feel like I’m in a gift shop. Like I could turn one upside down and find a price.”
    She laughs. “You probably would. You know I never remember to take the price tags off.” Which brings us back to our gifts, price tags intact, and not a Santa among them.*
    * AS SOON AS I GET HOME, I call Harry. He has a gig the next evening on the Cape. Can he come down early and look at some cottages with me? Harry is willing, even intrigued, but not as enthusiastic as I hoped he’d be. I want at those cottages, as soon as possible, but I also want Harry, Bog-Boy-in-Chief, to give me his professional opinion. Doesn’t he want to come first thing in the morning? No. Okay, early afternoon. Settled. Our friend Bruce will come too—another friend from BU Bookstore days who is visiting from Martha’s Vineyard.
    Sunday dawns bright blue and bitterly cold, the kind of day when it is better not to know the “windchill factor.” When Harry arrives, I give him barely a moment to say hello to Bruce before I bundle the three of us into Harry’s car. “I really need to find you a car,” I say, as we pull out of the driveway. “I’ve been looking, you know.” Another classified assignment.
    “I know,” he says, without enthusiasm. He is