Everyday Canvas

Picture-Postcard

Prompt: "I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door"..... What happens next?

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I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door.

I held that picture-postcard, drawn neatly and painted carefully by loving hands, but then thrown in the back of a drawer.

Such a well-kept place this might have been. No mess, no dead rodents, no broken dishes or bottles. I wondered what it was this tiny cottage. Who had lived in it? It had to be a nice couple, I surmised.

Did it contain displaced feelings and broken hearts or lost loves or chubby babies growing up to run about the hills and dales that seemed to lurk behind the cottage?

Maybe it was the home of a young couple who came up with an idea they could sell on Shark Tank, which as a deal, first went well, too well, almost suspiciously and then turned bad very quickly, even dangerous, even fatal. No, nothing fatal. Even my imagination, as dark as it can get, cannot handle anything fatal.

Maybe the couple never gave up this cottage even after moving into the big city to a fancy penthouse with a doorman in uniform at the entrance to the building. They didn’t, couldn’t, give the cottage up because they were happy here. Not so, when they had to be on top of things with that stupid idea that a Shark on the Shark Tank carried to extremes.

Maybe the couple is now inside the cottage, which is all that’s left of their fortune, and they are drinking one coffee after another and becoming re-acquainted with the tiny bathroom and dwarf-sized rooms. Maybe they are sharing loving looks and smiles of relief not because their little cottage can win the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval but because, after looking at some serious money, they came back to what was really important, to the cozy place that was the reflection of their true love.

I gently placed the picture-postcard back in the drawer. And yes, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door.

Maybe I, too, would find what I had lost.