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A quote: “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” ~~ Aeschylus
I’ll start with a story …
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My great-grandpa won title to this spit of land in poker game. Nana tongue-lashed him for the foolishness of worthless land.
But he built a tiny cottage and was forgiven. Five generations of us have had a place to spend summer days. Salt breeze in our hair, sand between our toes and nights in sleeping bags shoulder to shoulder with siblings and cousins.
Standing here I can still smell the Coppertone, hear laughter.
They’ve taken the house. If everyone can’t have one, then no one can have two. They’ll get the land, but not the cottage.
I light the match.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. feature image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Dupin says: It turns out the island cottage was a good investment.
I can’t say that we were all that prepared when the zombie apocalypse broke out. We did however have a cabin cruiser, and while the surf was up inland, the lagoon’s waters were smooth. Not many people lived on the island and the infection never got here. We’d loaded the boat to the gunwales with food and single malt. The cottage has a cistern…fish year-round…bonfires on the beach. We take occasional cruises mainland for canned goods and cases of Islay…zombies ignore these.
Life is different, but better here than there.
Navig8r says: Grandpa owned the whole tiny island. My cousins and I spent glorious summers searching for the pirate’s treasure that had to be there. When the movie “Summer of 42” came out, in our teenage fantasies we allowed that there might be a slight downside to all that privacy. Dad managed to resist the pressures to sell when the dot com millionaires discovered the area and values and taxes went sky high. The offshore wind farm brought values and taxes back down a bit for me. My grandkids enjoy it, but they suffer several days of screen withdrawal when they arrive.
Dupin says: Nice, but that movie reference is a blast from the past.
Cameron says: I smiled at the men from my porch as I sipped my whiskey.
“Gentlemen, there are three reasons you are here. First, you are foreign agents from Old America and you are trying to kidnap people who have claimed asylum. Your behavior tells me that the claim is legitimate. Secondly, this place is quite isolated and I am allowed a certain amount of flexibility with people like you.”
I set the drink down and picked up the chainsaw. “The final reason is because your government denied your existence and fish have to eat. I’ll give you a minute to pray.”
I still remember the line from a book I read as a kid: “If you really want to hurt a man, give him back something broken.”
I’d survived the re-education camps, the revolt and the civil war that followed. After twelve years I had finally come back to reclaim my patrimony.
When Great-grandpa came back from Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, he bought this little spit of land on the Outer Banks and built a cottage. I remember family get-togethers out here, and times when Mom and Dad brought us kids for a weekend. There’d been times when I’d watch the hurricane reports with my heart in my throat, but time and again that little cottage would survive.
As I approached, I thought that it had survived this storm as well. But when I opened the door, the stench told a different story. Squatters had made a mess of everything, pooping and peeing like a pack of dogs in the corners, smashing the furniture and tearing out all the light fixtures for the copper wire.
How much would it cost to fix? Could it even be fixed? Maybe just as well to take a match to the whole mess, then start over from scratch.
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