COTTAGE BY THE LAKE:
The Ties That Bind

I sit on the deck behind my cottage, only about 50 feet from the shore of Big Mountain Lake. I am enjoying the sunset, as I do most evenings. I have finished my dinner of pan-fried fish that I caught and cleaned myself from the Lake, with potatoes and corn that I grow myself in my garden, and a salad of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and peppers from the same garden. I have just lit up a sizeable pipe of the Good Stuff that I brought back on my most recent trip to Mexico. I used to be a cop, and I still have ID, so they never search me.

Life is good – I have owned this cottage free and clear for several years now, and about 20 acres of ground on either side, and I have it in the shape that I want it. No one comes here but me, and I like it that way, too. My father bought the place originally, and worked himself into an early grave trying to get it paid off. My mother always hated the place, and neither my brother nor my two sisters much liked it either, but I love it just like Dad did. He and I would come up here by ourselves more often than with them, and he taught me to fish up here, and to handle the small rowboat that came with the cottage. It became our Special Place. A few years after he died, my mother decided to sell it, and I scraped the money together to buy it from her (the greedy bitch never once thought of simply giving it to me as an inheritance from Dad – oh, no, not her…) My sisters and brother all had ideas about using this as their free vacation resort every summer, but I squashed those notions as soon as I had the deed in my hands. This was my Dad’s place, and they didn’t appreciate it when he was alive, and now it’s mine, not theirs.

This end of Big Mountain Lake is mostly wilderness – except for the small cove where my private dock is, the bluffs are too high and the shore too narrow and rocky to make for an attractive landing, and the land on the bluffs on either side of me for several miles is vacant and undeveloped. That land has been in the hands of only two families, one on either side of my land, for several generations now, and it is unlikely ever to be sold. I have a nodding acquaintance with both families, but they regard me mostly as “the weird hermit down in the hollow”, which is fine with me – it means that they leave me alone.

As I said, I used to be a cop – it was all that I ever wanted to be, someone to protect the weak and helpless, and the decent people, from the bad guys out there. It seems that I was a bit too zealous in interrogating prisoners and extracting confessions, and I had no patience with either bureaucracy or the machinations of our so-called ‘system of justice’, and no qualms about showing them up for the stupid, useless, ignorant buffoons that they were/are. So, of course, they determined that