Lessons Re-Learned
Not everything in life is a metaphor for writing. Probably. Maybe. For the past few days, people have been staying at the larger, less-rustic-but-still-rustic cottage* we own next door to our house (as opposed to the extremely rustic cottage on the other side of us). Their cottage has a wood heating stove in the kitchen and a fireplace and electricity; it has running (and hot) water pumped from the lake. It has no insulation, however, and significant gaps at a few places where walls don't quite meet rafters, and baseboard heat only in the bathroom (and the temperature has fallen below 5C/40F at night regularly for several weeks) with no organized heat anywhere else. In short, these people--who claimed to know what they were getting into, who claimed to welcome what they were getting into--have had to be a hardly lot. Their planned experience, a sort of retreat from their own lives into a physical location where they control their level of interaction with the outside world and