She felt a little stereotypical, if she was being honest, sitting on the end of the little “dock,” which was more like one-half of a broken-down boatslip that had not sloped so drastically into the river that you could not sit a few chairs and a cooler there to do your fishing. She was there in the barely-risen sunlight, gripping a mug of hot coffee, inhaling the steam and turning her face, eyes closed, up into the sounds of Nature in the Morning like a woman straight out of a Maxwell House commercial. She couldn’t help it. The peace of the only sounds being distant bird calls, the slightly less distant gurgle of the slow river gliding around a more rocky turn about a hundred yards upriver, and a rooster somewhere on the mountainside across the river doing his darndest to make sure everyone was up and at ’em was too good to not bask in. It reminded her why people retired anywhere away from the city. It made her feel like she, too, could live away from the city; she would figure out how to get what she wanted, and how to do what she wanted, and what she needed would somehow fall into place as it had for people living away from cities for millennia. And then she heard the buzz of something in a nearby bush and had to laugh at how not-willing she was to coexist among the many-legged. Out here, she felt that she was in their space; she could not demand that they leave her be because they had invaded her space in the city. Sure, there were buildings out here, but as surrounded by Nature as they were, how could she not be accepting of something with 6-to-8 legs that had hunkered down in some protected corner to survive the long winter months and the storms of spring and summer. No, to live this way full-time was not her destiny, she thought as she took along sip of her coffee.

And yet the night before, they’d all sat around the fire, mesmerized. She had been under the fire’s spell like the others. In between the clicks and cracks, she’d known that she’d heard something pacing back and forth, just at the wood-line, probably waiting for them to go to bed. She’d decided not to say anything, not that anyone else would have cared or made any moves to go inside. They were outside-people: campers, fishers. She was not. She jumped when she felt a spider’s web across her face, or when a mosquito buzzed in her ear. She had ignored the assortment of tiny dead things in the bathroom corner, and the fact that the screen door was not attached around all sides and that the inside door stayed open all day. Was the cottage comfortable? Without a doubt – and it was beautiful. The view from the screened-in porch was sun-dappled and serene. The river barely flowed past, and the only sounds were the bird and insect calls. She didn’t want to be the city girl, scared of everything, needing everything to be spic and span, so she had tried to keep her eyes out of the corners and on the river.

Around the bonfire, they drank and smoked fragrant clove cigarettes and talked about work: who they liked, and who they didn’t, who worked hard, and who didn’t, who would probably find another job soon, and who would probably retire from there. She thought she heard whatever was waiting in the woods for them to go in take a few steps closer when their laughter and chatter would die down momentarily; she could hear the twig crack or the leaves crunch, but it stayed just out of sight, the fire light as ineffective to find it as the moon had been on the mountains as she’d driven to the cottage in the dark of the night. The only indication there had been mountains was a mass of darkness that the moon couldn’t seem to penetrate looming up to her right and in front of her.

        “I think something is waiting for us to go in before it comes to see if we’ve left anything tasty by the fire,” she’d finally said.

        “If anything comes out of those woods to this fire, I’m running so fast you won’t be able to see me,” Katy’d said.

        And then, inexplicably, she’d wanted it to come out. Because as afraid as she was of the unseen spiders hanging in their near-invisible webs, and of whatever else she imagined was might be waiting to crawl out and get her, she as not afraid of whatever was lurking in the trees behind them. It could have been a mountain lion, a coyote, a family of deer, even a snake could have slithered out, and she felt like she would not be afraid. She wouldn’t run, not at first. She would wait and watch because she knew that whatever it was would wait and watch her too.

        As she imagined her bravery in the face of the thing in the trees, she did the thing that she had also told herself not to do when she got to the cottage: she made eye contact with him. His brown eyes, honey-glazed in the firelight, met hers over the flames, and that had been that…

Except it hadn’t really been anything. As the flames shrank, the small group had decided not to feed it any more logs, and in groups of two and then three and then the last three, Katy, him, and her, they’d gone in to bed. As she’d gingerly stepped over the dark lawn, she’d cast a last glance over her shoulder to see if anything stepped or crept or slithered out of the woods to the dying fire, but it hadn’t, at least while she’d watched. He’d walked into the house ahead of her, and their eyes had not met again.

So, perhaps she wasn’t so brave.

About this picture: A coworker of mine really does have a fishing cottage, and he graciously had a few of us up there –for just one night — to Mount Union, Pennsylvania in summer of 2022, after he’d been inviting us for years. There was a bonfire, there was drinking and fishing and smoking of cloves. There was nothing lurking in the woods to get us; there was no possibly-romantic interest among us. We were — are — more like family than anything else. This picture was taken in the perfect, unexpectedly cool morning on the side of the house, “the river barely flow[ing] past.”