Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved (2 page)

Rather than adding on, I have managed, these many years, to squeeze home and business into just three rooms, to limit my possessions (or to build more bookshelves), to create space in odd places, to blur the boundaries between home and office, to keep the kitchen counters clear—to be content, if slightly crowded, in my lovely little house.*

*
THERE WERE SHARDS
of window glass in the backyard and spider castles in the living room when I first laid eyes on my little house, though it wasn’t advertised—or priced—as a fixer-upper.

Hollies abound on the wooded setting of this unique one-bedroom cottage.

After months of low-budget house hunting, all the houses I hunted were looking pretty much the same. They were little ranches, situated on postage-stamp lots, treeless, and much too close to my least-favorite road on Cape Cod: Route 28. An abundance of hollies was exactly what I wanted, even if the wooded setting was starting to claim the little cottage situated between the cedar trees, even if the kitchen was last painted in 1952, even if the old wooden gutters were probably last cleaned that same year. Much to the dismay of my realtor, I made a lowball offer. After an evening of phone calls, we settled on a price that I could afford and that the owners could accept.

We passed papers on a clear day in May in 1987. I spent a month of nights and weekends scrubbing walls and windows, waxing floors, and removing the cheap white paneling in the bedroom. It was slow going, and the bedroom wasn’t yet ready for occupancy when the lease on my apartment ran out. I piled all my possessions in the living room and slept in front of the fireplace, my mattress the only object in the room that was allowed to lie flat.

After the bedroom, I worked on the kitchen. Almost every surface—walls, cabinets, ceiling, even the refrigerator—had been painted a jaundiced beige. I began by stripping the two knotty pine walls. The unfortunate yellow was not easy to remove. On the advice of the True Value hardware man, I purchased a stripping tool, a heat gun with a blade, which came in handy when I moved on to the kitchen cabinets. The cabinets I stained cherry; the wood walls, when they were finally revealed, I left in their natural state. The rest of the kitchen I painted white, as white as possible; same in the bedroom, same on the ceilings. Nonyellowing white I bought, as white as white gets. The kitchen counter I replaced with a speckled blue laminate, saving a piece of the original: it resembled a composite of hazardous waste sealed in gleaming plastic. I replaced the peeling beige-pink linoleum with blue-gray and white vinyl after I had the fridge refinished into shiny white. Then I moved on to the sickly green bathroom.*

*
NOWADAYS
, the nonyellowing whiteness is gone, replaced with saturated colors, colors that take risks. The still-bare wood in the kitchen meets warm red walls, walls the color of mulled wine. My bedroom is deep peach. The bathroom is painted an unapologetic pink. The wood floors still need refinishing, but Indian Sand Treewax—another recommendation from the True Value man—does a great job covering up the scratches and imperfections.

I have lost the eagerness to do it myself, and I rely instead on Harry and Tony, two old friends who happen to be handy around the house. Our friendship predates my Cape Cod life. We met in Boston back in 1983, when we all worked at the Boston University Bookstore. Harry’s a musician and Tony is working on his doctorate now; both have the flexibility for and interest in the occasional odd job that entails a Cape escape, and I am happy to have them here. I’ve known these guys for seventeen years; they’ve known each other for seven years beyond that. As a result, the three of us spend a great deal of time debating the merits of any project before we actually begin, and we tend to take long lunch breaks to discuss the politics of the day. It’s close to impossible to win an argument with the well-informed and tenacious Tony, but Harry and I do our best to help him perfect his scholarly form. In the summertime, we often end the workday with a swim at Long Beach, followed by Indian food for supper.

One Saturday, a few years back, when Harry and Tony were making me bookshelves in the kitchen, we decided they needed a corporate umbrella, a name. In minutes, they became the Bog Boys, named of course for the bog at the bottom of the hill. Two superintelligent men who are wonderful to have around the house. Two middle-aged guys who like to eat donuts and read the
Boston Globe
before they begin their workday. The Bog Boys? Oddly, the name is a perfect fit.

It is the Bog Boys who created the bookshelf that encircles the living room just above doorway height, who made the doors that enclose that washer-dryer I found in the
Pennysaver
. The Bog Boys made me a spice rack that spans the refinished cabinets on either side of my kitchen sink, and it was the Bog Boys who made my kitchen red, my bedroom peach, my bathroom first blue then briefly red, blue again, and finally spunky pink. The Bog Boys built me a pine vanity for my bathroom sink, and many years ago now, they made a cat shelf, a place for Egypt to land when he jumps up to bang on the bedroom window, demanding to be let in. As the kitty has aged, his cat shelf has become two shelves, stairway-style, to make his leap a little easier, and for this comfort, he can thank—who else—the Bog Boys.*

*
I MET MY CLOSEST NEIGHBOR
about a year after I moved in. She knocked loudly and with the certainty of someone who had watched this house being built almost forty years earlier. I opened the door to find a white-haired woman standing on my step. “I don’t want to come in,” she said, her voice at least as loud as her knock, “I just want to say thank you for fixing this place up. It had gotten to be a terrible mess.”

Of course I invited her in, but she would have none of it. “I’m Barbara Dowe,” she said as I stepped outside to continue the conversation. “My father built this place, you know, and my mother designed it. I live up the hill.” She pointed at the white bungalow with the colonial blue shutters. “My father built that house, too,” she added. “We used to have a cranberry bog right down there.” She lifted her head in the opposite direction, as though she were pointing with her nose. “Now it’s all grown up. A shame. I have a picture around somewhere that shows this cottage when it was first built, you know. You can see down to the bog. You might be interested in it.”

“Oh yes, I’d love to see it.” I introduced myself.

She nodded, then looked down past her bright red coat to her shoes, old-lady shoes, tan-colored, a little scuffed, but proper enough. A beat and a half passed before she looked up at me again. “Well, I won’t take any more of your time. I know you’re busy. I just wanted to say that it does my heart good to see you fixing this place up. Those last people that lived here, they didn’t care about anything. There was trash in the yard, a real mess, and I hate to think how the inside must have 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 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.