Grandma and I woke early, what I called, night morning. The cottage was still chill and damp with the smell of wood and must. She went through the little kitchen with the cooler of spring water, cupboards full of hand-me-down dishes from the fifties and older, and sink to the wrap-around sunporch with the late thirties style refrigerator that looked like a small car or a robot from a bad science fiction movie, the sort you heard nightmarish stories about kids getting locked in. She was wearing a purple floral housecoat and fuzzy slippers, her gray hair was pulled back. I was right behind her, barefoot, in my sheer yellow nightgown she'd made me, I was five-years-old. There was a little window above the metal card table that the squirrels would break-in if we left the peanut butter out. Grandma had it, now, and was packing us a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread that she slipped into her satchel for later. We ate nectarines then headed back past the dining-room with the big wooden table topped with the green plastic tablecloth printed with white doilies, through the TV room and back to our bedroom which had a double bed, a dresser that had a lacy piece of coral tucked in the corner of the mirror, and prints of big eyed girls dressed as harlequins and ballerinas on the far wall from the window. Sometimes the window got scary at night as there was a post in the back yard of the Weiggand cottage that Mummy said led to a well where the devil slept. There was the brown crick back there, full of crayfish, bluegills, big clams, and water spiders, plus the woods with monkeyball trees where there was another ancient refrigerator and a rolled-up carpet dumped. It was especially spooky when it rained, but it wasn't today, and everybody else was still asleep while we got dressed and left out the front door that had a spring and a hook latch.
We walked through the dewy meadow where I hunted butterflies. Mr. Gehring, the rotten old landlord, kept it mowed. His riding mower and hateful look were a familiar sight. Grandma was wearing green slacks with a matching turtle neck sweater, and I had a plastic windbreaker. It did not take long to reach the lake where we fed the geese and went beyond, across the road, into the woods, and up the hill. The birds were chirping their war cries and the floor was soft with old needles. It smelled of pine. After wandering a bit, I knelt down in wonder at a large red and white spotted mushroom with a white stem. Grandma called them toadstools, and I'd asked if toads really sat upon them. She had told me that they did, but The Little People liked them the most. This one had three perfect pine needle walls knitted around the stem, beneath the cap, and looked like a little bus stop for grasshoppers or mice. Grandma sat down beneath a pine at the top of the hill and handed me a sandwich. She told me if I was very quiet and still I might be lucky enough to see The Little People. She, and her brother, my Uncle Ray, who had made me my cradle and fashioned rosaries out of plum and peach pits, often talked about The Little People. It wasn't long for looking when we spied a gnome with a long white beard and a conical red cap. He wore a red jacket with brown pants and was about the size of a rabbit. He moved like a rabbit, too, and as soon as he saw us he scurried over the hill, into the undergrowth, and out of view.
The next morning Uncle Ray said The Little People had left me something and handed me a wad of damp newspaper. He told me they'd left it on the window ledge. Unwrapping it, it was a small hard rubber doll, like a Kewpie or one of those squeezey ones whose eyes pop out, only this one was dirty, had a wicked smile with a perverted expression and a big hard on. Mummy saw it, called it filthy, and threw it right in the metal trash can outside the cottage. I wasn't upset with her as it was pretty ugly and creepy.
I didn't tell anybody about it anymore until college. I went to school up in the country, not far from Camp. My roommate and I had a couple of strange occurrences, there, too. It was country where you would find lots of unlikely things such as may apples and Indian Pipes. Once we saw something that looked a lot like a hedgehog, only couldn't have been, run under the bed in our dorm room. Another night we saw Dryads dancing in the trees.
My friend and I had slept in a very small, one room cottage, there, off of Wolf Creek, one night. She was scared to tears, and I must say, I was frightened, too. We could not so much hear as we could feel that the cottage was surrounded by gnomes of ill intent.
