The first weekend of May was a beauty, and we chicks decided that we would help Fluffy open her family cottage a couple of weeks early. The sun and party fairies demanded it. Who are we to disobey?
Fluffy invited us to spend Saturday at Windmill Acres raking the beach, gathering the debris and kicking the mice out of their winter home so we could begin the cottage season.
We had an amazing greeting committee. Three baby racoons have taken up residence in the shed outside the cottage at Windmill Acres. And though Muffin and I were most excited by the prospect of seeing NAYchur up close and personal, Fluffy has a bit of a whipping fetish and made us do our chores before we turned into the camera crew from Animal Planet.
Rodentia that they are, those little critters sure are cute. Momma racoon was nice enough to let us take our many pictures without ripping our faces off. Those babies brought back the childhood pang of wanting a racoon as a pet. Bet there was a time when you wanted one, too.
The chores weren’t nearly as bad as we might have expected, and within a couple of hours we had our lawn chairs, frosty drinks and sunglasses on the sunny side of the ranch.
Although I am not at liberty to reveal full, gory details, I will tell you that the bra tree is alive and well, the stove is out of the kitchen, the mice can no longer live in the shower and the beach is relatively debris free, thanks to the raking magic of Roxie and Muffin.
You may think that we girls go up to Windmill Acres to cut loose, which is partly true. Of course, we get to cut loose every Wednesday, thanks to gifted prioritizing, but when you go to a cottage it’s just different.
Talk turns to deeper issues: religion, the universe, environmental issues, and whose turn it is to go refill the drinks. There is no clock, only the vague signals that your body gives that it is time to eat, drink, nap, or put more of the jigsaw puzzle together. We wear no make-up, there is no need for a hair dryer. If you plan correctly, throw your dishes in the fire pit and KP duty is done.
When it’s time to sleep, you fall in your sleeping bag, exhausted and snoring almost instantly. When you wake up the next morning, your ankles feel fuzzy and your breath is deadly.
It’s only when you get up that you realize your ankles don’t need shaving, but a chipmunk has decided to find its final resting place in the bottom of your sleeping bag. As the horror dawns on you, you wonder who was in charge of airing out the sleeping bags.
And even though you know you’ve never had a more disgusting bed companion, you can’t help but wonder when you get to come back to Windmill Acres. Oh, the joys of cottage life.
