She took down a picture from the hallway and tucked it under her arm. It’s the only thing she would take. It was of her grandfather as a toddler in front of a canvas tent. He was camping out on the dune in this very spot before HIS father built the cottage in the nineteen twenties. It was a two story, open stud, twentieth century, three season summer stunner as the real estate listing had aptly described it. “Tear it down and build your dream home, or pimp it out”.

You couldn’t stay in winter. The incoming cold would push you out around November first. Warren would assure you he’d blown the water out of the pipes a few times to make sure they wouldn’t freeze and burst.

The place was a shrine. Even the furniture seemed sacred. There was a lot of plush pumpkin orange and olive green. A tribute to her parents’ time here. Stuff that’s “probably worth a lot of money now” as her Dad had said so many times. A lot of money or nothing at all just like the cottage itself.

There was a chrome trimmed arborite kitchen table where her aunts would play poker in their bras and underwear to combat the heat trapped within the two by fours and clapboard. They would sweat and yell at each other in yiddish with love and trust and frustration. She was fifty two and they were all gone now but they sat there at that table in her mind. She could keep that table if by some miracle.

Even though she was the only one left to inherit the place there was never a trust set up to protect her from having to pay the capital gains tax which by now would be an enormous amount of money considering what it was worth. It was October and she was there to say goodbye.

October. What an appropriate time to end a season that lasted a hundred years. She would have one last walk through before leaving here forever. She had spent all her childhood summers here with her smokey sweaty aunts and her sweet sweet grandparents. She hadn’t been back here in so long having drowned herself in her carrier like alcohol.

It was hard to come back but now she wanted to keep it for another hundred years even though there were times when she would rather watch a wrecking ball smash through that little single attic window. She knew she wasn’t the only fourteen year old girl in an attic window with an uncle who had no regard for anything or anyone but his own sick perversions. She had stayed quiet through it and stared out that tiny payne at lake Erie and imagined floating on her back out there in the middle of it.

But this time she wasn’t here to think about that. She had chained him to a cinder block and shoved him overboard long ago if only in her fantasies. He was the wrecking ball at the end of a chain. A destroyer of innocence. There would be no wrecking ball today.

“Oh God. They wouldn’t”. She wept to think that whoever bought the place wouldn’t see it. Wouldn’t feel it. They might not see or hear her funny aunts or the charm of open studded walls, hunter green trim and a singing fish that would sing Ol Man River when you pressed a little red button. These things aren’t on House Hunters.

Just like so many things in her past she had no control over the future. She walked out onto the beach, turned around and looked up at the place. She was no longer in that attic window and he was where he belonged. At the bottom of the lake.She pulled on the strings to tighten her hood and walked away.