The Stone Cottage-Chapter 1

Chapter 1

She’d first decided to move from Maine to West Virginia a few months back in one of those moments of quickly made decisions of the sort one’s best friends would even second guess. Yet here she was starting fresh and new once again.

Looking back, her life had been a series of new starts or fresh beginnings all in the attempt to find that storybook ending she’d been promised as a child. Thus far she’d encountered the dragons and the ogres, the wicked witches and evil stepmothers, but never quite got to the gallant knight on the white steed who’d whisk her off to Forever-ever land. Knights she’d had a plenty, but they were the dented, rusty-jointed lost his lance somewhere variety that seemed more akin to Mordred than King Arthur.

Finally, just possibly, she was poised to actually find that long lost knight of fairy tale fame. Now, true, this version of once upon a time had surfed out of the miasma via the internet, and true even his armor was dented a time or two, but he spoke to her heart much the same as her cottage had, and to her, well, all the signs pointed somewhere that was in the opposite direction of the Forbidden Forest.

A devoted bachelor who’d been single again for many years, he hadn’t been looking for a relationship, let alone forever. He hadn’t been looking, didn’t need that sort of complication in his life and was quite happy with his own company, thank you very much! He was independent, self-sufficient and self-sustaining. He didn’t need a woman, although he liked women well enough. It was just that he hadn’t really come across one who’d fit inside his framework of the woman.

The woman didn’t have to be a heart-stopping, knock down, drag out beauty, but simply had to be okay looking as he really wasn’t all that into looks and surface features. What she did have to have, completely, utterly and clear through was a brain that thought, that could think and reason and just know what it (life, existence, living, being) was about. Just that.

She could be a writer or a teacher or any of a thousand things as long as she had things he didn’t. What he’d really been searching for was a woman he could learn from, equally as smart as he, with whom he could share thoughts and experiences and have that joining lead to something new, unexpected and totally different from the humdrum life so many folks settled for.

She hadn’t been looking either. She was alone, true, but happily so. She was empty-nested with all her chicks having flown to discover their own lives. For the first time in her adult life, she had no one to argue with, boss around or pick up after. Things were where she’d last left them and if, as happened occasionally, she couldn’t remember where that was, well then, it was no one’s fault but hers. She loved it!

She had no desire to work her life around anyone else’s thoughts, whims or neurotic tendencies. Her own were enough to deal with, thank you very much. The cats gave her someone to talk to and if she chose to listen to the same song over and over again, they neither complained nor sulked. She could eat when she liked, sleep when she liked and there was no one to tell her nay. Then Dylan’s and her emails crossed in cyberspace and everything changed.

To begin with, he was Irish and all the stereotypical Irish traits applied. He had the gift of Blarney and he was s a silver tongued charmer to be sure! He, too, was a writer and could spin a yarn with the best. That they both were storytellers was enough, in and of it self, to compel them to delve deeper. The more they dug, the more reasons they found to continue digging. This continued until the day an email arrived telling her he was off to West Virginia to follow his dream of building on the family homestead. Rather than putting either of them off, it provoked a phone call that might otherwise have been put off far longer.

This first of thousands of calls to follow was instrumental in cementing their new found friendship in that the overwhelming feeling she’d received as a result of that call, was that he and she simply must have had some interaction in a former life. This call was not two people who had never talked before and had only exchanged perhaps ten emails. This was a conversation resumed from some other time and picked up in the middle. There was no sense of awkwardness or feeling one’s way. This was two old, old friends getting caught up. The fact that they were getting caught up on this life time was absolutely acceptable. They simply already knew each other as only two people could who have been together for years and years. It was exactly like that.

Thus followed a meander around West Virginia during which she did not find him (and he didn’t know she was looking) and also during which she flat out fell in love with the state. Driving down (and up) a multitude of back roads that twisted and turned through the mountains, she felt as if she were returning to someplace she’d already been although she’d never been to West Virginia before. It reminded her of Scotland and she felt as if she’d come home.

Of course he didn’t even know about this meander until several weeks later when they were, once, again, in touch by phone. Daily calls (sometimes hourly) followed until she’d headed down once again over the holiday. Upon actually meeting him, she knew several things within the first few minutes. She knew she loved him. It was not that euphoric, giddy love one experiences when first falling in love, when the endorphins rage and minds became singularly one tracked. This was the warm and safe love of two old folk who’d been married for twenty years.

Following that realization was that this was, indeed, where she was supposed to be; that he was, indeed, the one She’d been waiting for all her life and then, yet once again, the intense feeling of coming home.

For a week they meandered, talked, traveled to visit family, trekked his ridge, loved and woke up to coffee together. They made soup and plans that looked more to next year than the next day. Thus, she was now happily ensconced in her stone cottage a few miles away from him as they begin the serious business of shaping their lives together. And, as ridiculous as it may seem, she was looking forward to their first date which will follow by several months his proposal of marriage.