Kate had been at the cottage for four weeks. There had been so much to do. First, she cleaned everything. After being closed up for many years, the cottage had layers of dust. There were also mouse droppings.
The cottage had become a mouse haven over the winters. That was unsanitary and potentially unhealthy. She had to disinfect everything. Then there was the garden. It had to be weeded. It was filled mostly with perennials, but some had not made it through the various winters. So, she weeded and tended, extracted and planted. She also decided that she needed to replace some of the furniture. Some of it had been nibbled by mice and some of it smelled of mold and mildew. She didn’t want to replace it with just anything. She wanted furniture that fit with the ambience of the cottage and was consistent with its style and past. This meant making a couple of trips back to the mainland. The expenditure was not insignificant. She scoured the country-side looking for antiques which she supplemented with well made reproductions in the William Morris style. All such acquisitions were duly conveyed across the water by boat. The place was starting to look good.
Kate loved birds. She had made a couple of very respectable bird houses with her own two hands and also made totally with materials on the land. She climbed up two of the trees on her property and lovingly hung them. She was pleased that both were now inhabited. She also planted red begonias in planters on the porch and hung humming bird feeders in front of the cottage. She was duly rewarded by the visit of the emerald hummingbirds, local but particularly selective and discriminating visitors.
Kate had come to the cottage to write.
She inherited the cottage when her mother died. The cottage was a place of respite and happiness all through her childhood. Her memories of the cottage were only good ones. It was here that her father, a botanist, had shown his love and knowledge of nature to her, his only child. He instilled in his daughter a love of the environment and a profound sense of the sanctity of nature. She knew all of the local vegetation by its Latin name as well as by its local, colloquial name. Kate could track wildlife as well as any Native guide and had been taught well about survival in the woods if she ever found herself lost for any reason.
When she was seven, her father showed her how to gut a fish. Many early summer mornings, she and her father would row out onto the deep, clear lake and catch fish which they brought home. Kate gutted the fish and they would then wake her mother to a breakfast of eggs and pan fried lake trout. Her mother always seemed amazed and praised them as if each breakfast were totally unexpected and absolutely miraculous both because of their wildlife initiative and their culinary skills. These were Kate’s summers for 14 years. This was her childhood and the bedrock of her sense of self and sense of connectedness, with her parents and with her natural world.
Kate’s father developed a bad heart and died when she was 15 years of age. The cottage remained closed for five years but then Kate talked her mother into reopening it for a month one summer when Kate was in her third year of university. Once again, the cottage was a wonder to her, this time because she and her mother spent long evenings, before the sweet smelling wood fire, talking about ideas. Kate also spoke to her mother those evenings about her dreams of becoming a novelist. Her mother was kind and thoughtful and supportive. Kate thought that she and her mother would spend each summer that way. But after two summers, her life changed. She met her husband while in graduate school, had a child, and became a journalist. The cottage was too far away for her complicated and busy life. Her husband did not like the cottage. In fact, her husband did not like nature at all. Although she had thought that they were both urbane and educated people who would appreciate the cottage, he thought it a bore, a pedestrian and boring slice of the bourgeois, with too many bugs and too few amenities. The cottage stayed closed for over a decade. Her mother did not venture there alone.
When Kate was thirty years of age, she wrote and published her first novel. It was very well received. One review called her the most promising young writer in the English language to come around in a long time. She quit her job as a journalist and started work on her second novel. That was five years ago. In the second year into writing her second novel, her mother died and she felt desolate and abandoned. Her husband was supportive for a year but then grew weary, had an affair with one of his students at the university where he was a professor, and left Kate. Kate kept trying to write and ended up with three dead-ended novels, promising beginnings with no middles and no ends. That was two years ago. This spring, Kate decided that enough was enough. It was time to get her life in order and her sense of her own self back. Kate decided that it was time to re-open the cottage.
Kate looked down at the big toe on her left foot as the large hammer that she had dropped smashed onto it. The pain shot through her foot and all her senses shifted radically. Her vision cast all colours more brightly, infused with a backdrop of intense white light. Her hearing seemed to have developed a background crackle, like an electric current. It seemed to burn. Suddenly, she smelled the hundreds of lilies growing in her garden although she hadn’t noticed their smell before. She panted and tried to speak. There was no one there to hear her but she thought she should articulate her pain. When she opened her mouth, no words came out.
She stood immobile for some time and then looked down at her toe again. The nail had split in two and blood was flowing freely from the broken nail. She walked through the open door that she had been fixing. She walked using her right foot and left heel to guide her to the kitchen. Once there she put more wood on the embers in the wood stove, filled the kettle with water, poured herself a tumbler full of single malt scotch, found the band-aids and took an ibuprofen. She sat, sipping her scotch and looking at her toe, wondering if she needed stitches. She had come up to the cottage for two months to write. She had wanted to be far away from all distractions. Well, she was far away all right. The boat ride to the marina where she had left her car took at least an hour. From the marina, it was another half hour drive to the community health clinic where, if she was lucky, a locum would be doing his one day a week practice there and stitch up her toe.
The scotch had done its job and while her toe throbbed like a pulse, she now felt some distance from it. She filled a basin with hot water from the kettle, poured herself another half glass of scotch which she sipped while soaking her toe. When she had finished the second scotch, she placed a large bandage on her toe, attaching it tightly enough hopefully to stop the bleeding. Then, she threw the bloody water outside. She grabbed the cat, which was being surprisingly docile, and laid down in bed on her right side, clutching the cat to her bosom and cried a bit until she fell into a drunken, soporific sleep.
When she awoke, she was disoriented and was surprised to find the cat asleep beside her with its head on her pillow. She looked at the bedside clock and became more confused still as she read 2:13. It was so bright for 2:13. When she moved her foot and it hurt, she remembered the events of the morning and realized that it was 2 in the afternoon, not 2 in the morning. She looked at her toe which was now hugely swollen, distorted and covered in dried blood. Her entire foot was covered in dried blood as was the sheet on which the toe had bled. She got up, returned to her kitchen and repeated all of the activities that she had performed that morning after the accident with the addition of opening a can of chicken noodle soup and putting it in a pan on the wood stove. When the soup was ready, she poured it into two mugs, one for her and one for the cat. She knew that this was a bit odd but it reassured her to treat the cat as an equal in this adventure. She did not pour the cat a glass of scotch, however, which proved to her that she still had her wits about her.
Kate returned to her bed once more. She woke again at 8:30 pm. She laid there and fell asleep again within a few minutes. This time she dreamt.
She found herself standing in a long, white lace, Victorian-styled night gown. Her hair, though in actuality very short, now hung in long plaits down her back. She recognized that her hair and her nightgown were familiar relics of childhood. She was dressed as she was at bedtime throughout her childhood. This was a romantic and impractical gown but one she loved and remembered well. Her long blond hair was braided as her mother had done each night, only to release her hair in long, soft curls before she went to school each day.
Kate was standing in her bare feet. She looked with regret at her left foot and wondered if her toe was actually broken. She then looked up at the edifice before her. She knew immediately where she was even though she had only been there once before and that was many years ago. She was standing at the base of a long, ascending set of very short steps. She was at St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. St. Joseph’s Oratory was a huge cathedral, built to honour Brother Andre, a Catholic priest who was known for his miracles in curing the lame and helping them walk. The oratory was said to house 30,000 crutches from people who came in crippled and walked out cured. She wondered if Brother Andre was now a saint. The local Catholics were sure that he would be recognized as a saint by the church when she had visited the oratory in high school and that was a very long time ago. Kate remembered seeing Brother Andre’s heart which was on display, immersed in the holy water with which Brother Andre cured people. She remembered being told that some people had stolen the heart once (or maybe she was confusing this with Einstein’s brain). No, now that she thought about it again she was sure that both Brother Andre’s heart and Einstein’s brain had been stolen. Fetishistic organ lovers. How ghoulish, she thought. She wondered now how the heart had been returned or whether the church had just put someone else’s heart there in its stead. She had had similar thoughts the first time she had visited Europe as a young woman. All those relics - parts of saints, the Virgin Mary’s milk - it pushed the credibility line, surely.
Anyway, here she now was and she remembered these steps. These were not the main steps up to the oratory. These were the pilgrimage steps. People who were supplicants to Brother Andre went up these steps on their knees. She looked at the steep incline. There were so many steps. Her knees would be bloody and sore long before she reached the top. Oh well, she thought. She hitched her night gown up so that she would not trip on the material. She got on her knees and slowly began the ascent. She had taken no more than three steps when the stairs suddenly became an escalator. Quickly the stairs moved upwards. As she ascended, she saw Brother Andre standing at the top of the pilgrims’ steps. More miraculously than the vision of Brother Andre himself, she also saw that his heart was back in his chest. It was radiating light, just like those Catholic pictures of Jesus. He was holding his arms out as if to embrace her. Just as she was about to plow into him, the escalator stopped. She looked up and Brother Andre placed his hands on her head. He said, “Ecrivez, ma soeur”, and winked at her.
She woke. It was morning. She had slept through the night. She sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She believed that her toe would be perfect and that Brother Andre had cured her. The swinging of her legs caused her big left toe to throb and pain. She looked and saw the toe looked just the same, black and blue and bloody. She thought, oh well, I must have polysporin around here somewhere. Today, she would not waste her time fixing front doors. She had come here to write, not to clean, not to garden. She had come here to find herself and find her way. She looked at the cat and smiled and patted his head. “Écrivez, ma soeur”, she said and laughed out loud. Today she would start writing.
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