Georgie and the Cottage

The cottage doesn’t look like much to a casual observer. The open porch is a bed of concrete with pillars the thickness of railroad ties holding up the roof. The front of the building is gray wood siding with two windows and an entry door.

Upon opening the squeaky screen door a wooden front door greets you. It’s a simple door with a large window inset on the top. Beneath the window is a nameplate, presumably placed there by the owner to built the cottage originally. It says, “Flanders 41.”  The name of the man my father bought the land and house from was Flanders.

Once inside the cottage, you are taken back to a time when life was simple and much slower. The entire cottage is open with two bedrooms off to the right of the main room. There is no bathroom, for there is no running water. To the side of the sink in the far left corner is a hand pump. Out in back is a traditional outhouse with two doors.

The walls are painted with a drab shade of green, almost a smoky mint color. Half of the main room has a carpet of a dark gray pattern. It is a harsh, thin carpet, intended more for durability than comfort. The rest of the floor is covered with lighter gray tiles of unknown material. They are hard and brittle now, but they may have once been flexible. These tiles extend into the bedrooms as well.

Along the left wall are two windows. Two more windows also line the back wall which was once the kitchen area. There is no window over the sink in this cottage. The electricity is simple. There is just one light fixture in the middle of the main room.

The bedrooms are off to the right side. Similar in size, each is just big enough for a double bed and a couple dressers. The walls are also the same ugly shade of green as the main room. There are no closets, no storage space. In fact, the only type of storage area in the cottage at all is the dish cupboard hanging over the sink.

Today, this might be the equivalent of an efficiency apartment for a single occupant if you turned one of the bedrooms into a bathroom. Back in 1940, however, it would have been fine for a family of three or four.

As a child this cottage was on our property. I associated it with an invisible character I created named Georgie. Although he was a constant companion to all my siblings I just realized it was I who actually called him into existance.

Who was he? I’m not completely sure honestly. In my mind he was a mischievous character who skulked around at night, spied on us during the day and like to play pranks on us. We blamed him for knocking over bottles and leaving cryptic messages etched into the sand for us to discover. (Although quite often these cryptic messages were of my own making and imagination).

As we grew up my sister and I pulled simple pranks on my younger siblings after they were called into the house at night and then attributed these pranks to Georgie. We would use pieces of drywall to write messages on hard surfaces for them to find in the morning. We “painted” things with blackberry juice. Blackberries grew wild around our house. Georgie was quite the prankster for a while.

Now, I’m much older and (hopefully) wiser. Georgie should have been long forgotten as a past memory. Yet, as I have been digging through my past this year, dredging through memories trying to heal some of the wounds of my youngers years, Georgie has come through loud and clear. How does an “invisible” person remain with us throughout our lives?

Being sensitive to some otherworldly things I now have to wonder if there was more to the character than I first understood. Was he really an invisible character? Or did I give a life to something that was already existing in the area?

As a child I never actually visualized what he looked like physically. I didn’t need to. It didn’t matter for the purposes we needed him for. He just had to exist in our minds. He could have been a wisp of wind and it would have been OK.

A couple weeks ago I sat down with my paints to give him a physical appearance. I had nothing to go on but my own imagination. I wasn’t really sure what I would reveal or how I would go about it. Basically I just dipped the brush into the colors and let him show me what he looked like. I didn’t give him detailed facial features although in the end result it seemed that he resembled my father’s face a little.

When I was finished he looked like a younger man, maybe in his thirties. He was average height and weight. He looked to be rather fit. I had painted him with a hooded cloak, perhaps because I had always assumed he sneaked around at night.

When I finished the painting I was uncomfortable with it. As I looked at him, he felt rather creepy to me. In a way, I almost wished I had left him in my imagination and not tried to give him physical characteristics. He was still friendly and likable in my head. In the painting I didn’t like the way he made me feel.

Was Georgie a real spirit that hung around the property when I was a child? Was he a previous owner, maybe even the Flanders who we assume build the cottage? Is this why I seem to associate the cottage with him?

I may never know.

Happy Halloween.