In the midst of the January ice and grey, we got a call from a fellow cottage owner telling us it looked as if someone had broken into our cottage.
Immediately, I made mental insurance inventory. I thought of the television sets and microwave oven we should have brought back in to the city and wondered how many tools Charlie would be missing.
The cottages sit uninhabited from October 15 until April 15. The land is accessible only by a cratered dirt road which runs through a farm field.
In the summer time, the drop from pavement to dirt forces you to slow down, check the incremental weekly progress of the crops (soybeans in 2005, corn last year) and decompress for a place without streetlights or schedules.
In the winter, the road is a barrier - at least to us. We waited a couple of weeks until enough snow had melted to give us a chance to attempt the icy maze.
The porch door screen was slashed top to bottom and the glass of the front door lay in icy shards on the ground. The lace window curtains were pulled through the jagged edge by the wind and frozen in place.
But television sets and the microwave were exactly where we'd left them. Cupboards and drawers were all yanked open with their contents spread randomly about the small space. Fire extinguishers were completely discharged covering the chaos with a coat of grey powder as much as a half inch thick.
Kids, we thought, looking for drugs or money. Our cottage is not the place to find either- at any time. The first aid kit, with bandages unfurled, was scattered over two rooms -- apparently at that realization. Several 1.5 liter bottles of liquor were pulled out of the cupboards, but left behind.
The wicker furniture Aunt Judy gave us was piled high and probably damaged, and an empty sheath on the floor reminded us that we used to have a hunting knife inherited from previous cottage occupants.
Our warm breath sent sad semaphore signals in the icy indoor air as we quietly trudged through the mess, but we were largely relieved. Our cottage stood.
Charlie boarded up the front door while city dog Lily ran wildly through snowdrifts and inadvertantly skated across ice patches. Her antics had us both laughing as we started the car and cranked up the heat.
We started the clean up a few weeks ago, placing things back into their cupboards and piling up the "extinguished" bedding and wicker furniture for the burn pile. Charlie and Lily went out to the cottage a few times this week with the vacuum cleaner while I was at work.
They were there early on Friday, stocking the refrigerator and preparing for the our first 2007 overnight. It was an eight-day-week at the office, but the sun was warm and bright and by Friday afternoon, every other thought was about joining my husband and dog at our cottage.
Regular visitors here know the cottage, built by my grandfather just in time for my parent's honeymoon, is my touchstone. I couldn't possibly consider it a coincidence that it came on the market just as we were resettling in Buffalo. Two other families had filled it with activity and memories for three decades, but in my mind it was always mine -- the best place of my childhood quickly became the haven of my middle age.
That Charlie, who saw it for the first time in late 2004, feels the same way about the place is testament to its appeal.
He was sitting on the front porch when I pulled up Friday evening. The grill was hot and ready on the side porch. I left my computer bag in the car, because that's the only approporiate response.
Charlie had worked hard. All evidence of extinguishers and idiots was gone.
None of the other cottagers ventured out so early in the season, so all the green and creekfront belonged to us as we ate thick steaks on the front porch while Lily stretched in the sun.
But later that night, I noticed our sign was missing. The tacky, silly-ritual, county fair sign, with our names carved in hardwood identifying to potential guests that this was indeed the cottage of Charlie and Judi Griggs.
We usually came to visit Buffalo around my birthday - which always conicided with the fair. Every time we passed the booth I'd tell Charlie we'd have to get one of THOSE signs if we ever got a cottage. We purchased the cottage in June. The sign booth was our first stop at the fair that August.
There was no imaginable reason to take the sign. I went out to the car and brought my computer bag in, not to work, but to protect it from the unseen threat.
Other items were discovered missing or damaged. Charlie and I always sat in the same two comfortable green porch chairs "watching the creek" as he smoked a cigar and I read. I had the book, he had the cigar, but one of the chairs was found in the backyard missing a leg.
I started to feel them in my space. It was crowded and uncomfortable.
It was pitch dark outside when Lily went out for her final evening constitutional. She alerted on something in the front yard and barked fiercely. It was likely a raccoon or a leaf. But I ran back inside sure my heart was visibly pumping under my t-shirt.
The faceless group had drained several bottles of cough syrup at the cottage next to ours before their winter visit. They were wild, random, stupid and stoned.
They would not come back with us there, I told myself. But they would not leave my thoughts or subsequent dreams.
The bonfire on Saturday morning was bright and angry, stoked with several pieces of varnished wicker. But it wasn't enough of an exorcism. I suggested we go back to the city Saturday.
It will be better when our neighbors return and the night air is filled with fireflies and strains of the sloppy song we sing when someone is out of the silly, multi-generational card game we play on porches.
Over the years I've been mugged once, had a home robbed and several car break-ins. When I was a reporter, I had a knife fight victim fall bleeding against me. Those are the things the world does.
But somehow at the cottage, it should be different. The idiot kids managed to take something I didn't think I could give them. There is no legal penalty for the conversion of magic.
I want it back.


Copyright 2007 Judi Griggs