Of Cottages & Chocolate Boxes

What's the nicest gift you've ever been given? Just after college graduation, my roommate and best friend of four years gave me the most thoughtful thing I've ever received. It's a spiral-bound book she had made that has all of our email exchanges since freshman year (we wrote a LOT of emails). Every single one--even three pages worth of us going back and forth during a study session at the library discussing what dinner options. Some of it poignant, and some of it less so, but all of it forever captured in capsule of time in 200-something pages.

For a while, I didn't read it because I knew buried inside it chronicled so many longing dreams for the future, which, straight out of college, we were both going to work on. I made an unconcious effort to avoid reading those pages until after something happened in my life so that I could look back with less anxiety about how little I've progressed and more appreciation for what I hoped to have done. Somewhere during the bustle, I had forgotten about the book, until today when I was spring cleaning (finally!) my closet and there it was wedged between my culinary class notebook and crinkly human development papers.

I've spent an hour reading the pages of emails, laughing out loud, grinning like a child and generally remembering my life from nearly 6 years ago, though it feels like just last week. I can't help but think how little I've changed. The words and thoughts are the same, but things outside of myself are different. If I could travel back in time and tell my 20-year-old self where I'd be now, I'd pinch me. Shake me. And make sure I wasn't hallucinating. Life is strange like that. (Like, have you ever put a stray event in your life into one random sentence and see how silly it can sound? I have a lot of those.)

So dreams. I've mentioned it here before, and I say it plenty in my old emails, but I've always dreamed that for some part of my life I'd move out to the coast and into a warm, little cottage complete with lemon tree in the backyard (or grapefruit, I'm not picky when it comes to citrus). This idea has accompanied me in some derivative ever since I saw Matilda.




Miss Honey's cottage, like something A. A. Milne described out of the Hundred Acre Wood. This was my takeaway as an 11-year-old. That, and having a chocolate box.


Life lesson: we should all treat simple, everyday pleasures as treasures to be savored. Honestly, go buy in an indulgent box of chocolate just for yourself, just because, eat it during a certain time of the day like it's a special treat and tell me that it doesn't make you giddy inside. But, that's a digression. Back to storybook cottages.

There is a reason I haven't reread Breaking Dawn. I've read it only once in entirety. Forgiving the fact that the story of Bella and Edward is everything and is already too much for me to handle (you know what I mean and we don't even need to go there), but, it also includes my cottage. Mine. The one that I still allow myself to daydream of, of which I'm fully aware is an unusual childlike fascination I have for fairy tale cottages and other imaginary things.

Basically, I didn't know what to do with myself when I came to the chapter where vampire Bella discovers her new home:

“Stop there. Turn her just a little to the right. Yes, like that. Okay. Are you ready?” she squeaked.

“I’m ready.” There were new scents here, piquing my interest, increasing my curiosity.

Scents that didn’t belong in the deep woods. Honeysuckle. Smoke. Roses. Sawdust?

Something metallic, too. The richness of deep earth, dug up and exposed. I leaned toward the mystery.

Alice hopped down from my back, releasing her grip on my eyes.

I stared into the violet dark. There, nestled into a small clearing in the forest, was a tiny stone cottage, lavender gray in the light of the stars.

It belonged here so absolutely that it seemed as if it must have grown from the rock, a natural formation. Honeysuckle climbed up one wall like a lattice, winding all the way up and over the thick wooden shingles. Late summer roses bloomed in a handkerchiefsized garden under the dark, deep-set windows. There was a little path of flat stones, amethyst in the night, that led up to the quaint arched wooden door.

I curled my hand around the key I held, shocked.

“What do you think?” Alice’s voice was soft now; it fit with the perfect quiet of the storybook scene.

I opened my mouth but said nothing...

He chuckled with me. He held his hand out toward the doorknob, waiting for me to do the honors. I stuck the key in the lock and turned it.

“You’re such a natural at this, Bella; I forget how very strange this all must be for you. I wish I could hear it.” He ducked down and yanked me up into his arms so fast that I didn’t see it coming—and that was really something.

“Hey!”

“Thresholds are part of my job description,” he reminded me. “But I’m curious. Tell me what you’re thinking about right now.”

He opened the door—it fell back with a barely audible creak—and stepped through into the little stone living room.

“Everything,” I told him. “All at the same time, you know. Good things and things to worry about and things that are new. How I keep using too many superlatives in my head. Right now, I’m thinking that Esme is an artist. It’s so perfect!”

The cottage room was something from a fairy tale. The floor was a crazy quilt of smooth, flat stones. The low ceiling had long exposed beams that someone as tall as Jacob would surely knock his head on. The walls were warm wood in some places, stone mosaics in others. The beehive fireplace in the corner held the remains of a slow flickering fire. It was driftwood burning there—the low flames were blue and green from the salt.

It was furnished in eclectic pieces, not one of them matching another, but harmonious just the same. One chair seemed vaguely medieval, while a low ottoman by the fire was more contemporary and the stocked bookshelf against the far window reminded me of movies set in Italy. Somehow each piece fit together with the others like a big three-dimensional puzzle. There were a few paintings on the walls that I recognized—some of my very favorites from the big house. Priceless originals, no doubt, but they seemed to belong here, too, like all the rest.

It was a place where anyone could believe magic existed. A place where you just expected Snow White to walk right in with her apple in hand, or a unicorn to stop and nibble at the rosebushes.

Edward had always thought that he belonged to the world of horror stories. Of course, I’d known he was dead wrong. It was obvious that he belonged here. In a fairy tale. And now I was in the story with him.

A PLACE WHERE ANYONE COULD BELIEVE MAGIC EXISTED. A UNICORN. She really wrote "unicorn" in there. I mean...really.

I should also mention that just around the time of my Matilda viewing, I went on a family trip through Carmel, California. A place where legitimate fairy tale cottages exist. Literally. Take a look through this absurdly charming photoset.

I can't even.

Besides the obvious anticipation for Breaking Dawn, there's now--at least for me--this. I hope it is as beautiful and quaint and colorful and perfect as I imagine it to be.