Once upon a time a tiny cottage nestled in a little clearing, surrounded by daisies and hollyhocks and a few overgrown rambler roses. It was a stone cottage – warm honey colored stone – with a thatched roof and a blue painted door. The window by the door had tiny diamond shaped panes of glass in it and a window box under it. Inside, it was really too small to be called a one-room cottage. Maybe a half-a-room cottage, if you were stretching it.
There was room for a narrow bed, a shelf for dishes and food and underneath it a small chest for clothing and linens , and a three-legged stool by the fireplace. The fireplace had a hook for a kettle or pot. The door opened between the bed and fireplace, and the nightstand by the bed which held the candle doubled as both the kitchen counter and the table. You needed to go all the way to the nightstand and squeeze against in order to shut the door. This could be very awkward if you had a visitor. Then one of you needed to lie down on the bed to have enough room to get the door shut. Maybe a quarter-of-a-room cottage would describe it better.
But it was cozy and tight – as long as you discounted the occasional spider that dropped down out of the thatch – and when the wind howled through the trees outside and the snow drifted up to the eaves, the little cottage was always warm and snug.
There was something special about this tiny cottage. It was a storybook cottage. By this I don’t mean it looked like one, because while it did have that storybook look to it, it was really something more, something magical.
The first time it was used in a story was when a certain little girl in a red cape and hood brought some food to her poor old grandmother who was living in the little cottage at the time. Little Red Riding Hood fortunately figured out that what she first thought was Grandma was actually a very greedy wolf, who wanted to eat not only the dinner Little Red was carrying but also Little Red herself, after already eating Grandma. (Little Red may have needed glasses.) No wonder the woodcutter was able to take the wolf out with only his axe. That wolf must have been as fat as butter! (Some people say that the smart little pig in the “Three Little Pigs” actually built the place, and was responsible for installing the pot-hook in the fireplace, but his story says he built a brick house and not a stone one, so this may not be true.)
After that the cottage served in several other stories – the cottage the poor couple lived in in “Rapunzel”, the home of the princess who became the “Goosegirl” while she was herding geese, and the house of the poor woodcutter and his family in “Hansel and Gretel” (they were a tight squeeze- it almost excuses the stepmother, but not really); in short it was used in any story that needed a tiny, picturesque cottage in it.
Eventually, most of the stories that required a truly tiny cottage had been told and re-told. You needed at least a half-a-room cottage, if not a full one room cottage for the rest of the stories.
However, this was a storybook cottage, and everyone knows that stories tend to grow and change with the telling; the storybook cottage was no different than the stories it was part of. After the story with Hansel and Gretel, so many stories had been told with the little cottage in it that it started to grow. (It’s a pity that it didn’t before “Hansel and Gretel”, or things might not have spun out the way they did.) But after that, the little cottage grew an extra ten feet or so on the front and sides. There was room for a small table and some pallets on the floor now, and the spare wood for the fire no longer had to be kept under the bed, which cut down on stray beetles crawling on the sleeper at night. (It did nothing about the spiders that dropped down from of the thatch, though.)
A few more stories passed through, like “Snow White and Rose Red”, and the story of the silly fisherman and his wife in the “Magic Fish” and of course “Jack and the Beanstalk” (the beanstalk certainly made a mess out of the yard), and then the little place was empty for a while. (No one wanted to live there, what with the rotting giant beanstalk and, for that matter, the dead giant that everyone said was too big and too much work to bury. The whole region was almost uninhabitable for almost a year because of him.)
In fact, it was empty for so long and falling in to such disrepair, that it was on the verge of shrinking again just from lack of use, when one day it gave a mighty shudder and heave and grew an attic with a ladder going to it. It also got a little bit bigger in general, and the next day a group of mining dwarves moved in, cleared up the giant bones and fixed the place up. They made little beds to go in the attic, and a long table with seven three legged stools to sit on. For some reason, they left the narrow bed in the corner downstairs, but the reason for that became clear when Snow White (not the same as the one in the story with Rose Red; Snow White seems to be a popular name for girls in these sorts of stories) fled the huntsman trying to kill her and came to live with the dwarves for a while.
After they moved on, a small family of bears moved into the cottage and completely redecorated, with a table big enough for three bears, three chairs in front of the hearth, and three beds upstairs. Of course, the smallest chair did have to be repaired after a certain Miss Goldilocks came to call uninvited, but that is the way the story goes. Later still, a youngest son named Gluck lived there with his greedy older brothers until he met the King of the Golden River and became quite wealthy – since his brothers had been turned to stone by their own greed, the little cottage became empty again.
Then the house gave a tremendous shudder and grew again. It grew and it grew. It became a small mansion, with cedar trees beside it (they had been on the edge of the clearing, but the house grew so much it took up the whole clearing now) and a magnificent slate roof. All the spiders that had lived in the thatch were suddenly homeless and grumblingly vacated to the brand-new cellar which wasn’t nearly so pleasant as the thatch had been.
A young widower with a sweet little daughter moved in and they were ever so happy until he married a scheming woman with two very nasty daughters…but you know that story. Cinderella ended up with the prince and lived happily ever after, they say.
After this, the place was vacant again for a while and then the little-cottage-turned-large-mansion gave its biggest heave yet and became a castle, just in time for a young queen and king to move into it and long for a baby daughter, who in turn was cursed by an evil fairy. The giant thorns that grew around the castle for one hundred years while the whole household slept bore little resemblance to the roses that had once surrounded a certain little cottage in the woods, although they were distantly related. The castle was of honey-colored stone, though.
For many years, the storybook cottage in the woods had served as home to many of the wonderful stories that people told around their fires at night or read to their children at bedtime. But then the stories fell into disuse. Oh sure, there were some animated movies made of them, but animated movies are the same every time. They don’t change and grow in the retelling like living stories do. Even a story that is being read changes a little from time to time, especially when the child to whom it was read grows up and recounts the story to their children without the book.
So the storybook cottage in the woods began to shrink. It went down to a mansion first, and then to a large comfortable house. But no one used it, so it shrank again and again until it was once more the tiny one-quarter-of-a-room cottage in the woods with hollyhocks and rambler roses around it. It grew sadder and sadder looking (it couldn’t grow any smaller and still have four separate walls). The only ones happy about it were the spiders who once more could live in the thatch, although there was no one living there for them to drop down on, which spoiled half of their fun.
It was a terribly sad thing for the little neglected cottage, and an even sadder thing for the people who were living without the stories, had they but known it. But they went along in their ignorance, except for the occasional person who found an old, half forgotten book of fairy-stories and enjoyed them or the scholars who studied the old tales and took them apart and analyzed them as folklore. The former didn’t usually know anything about stories growing with use and never bothered to repeat them because they thought no one else would be interested, and the latter didn’t want the stories to grow and change because then where would all of his research be?
The cottage was on the verge of collapsing into a heap of honey-colored stone when one fine spring afternoon a person came hiking through the forest. (The person had a backpack full of things like paper and pens and ink and colored pencils and watercolor paints, as well as the usual spare clothing and food.) The hiker spied the little cottage and went over for a closer look. There were holes in the thatch and the door wasn’t quite on its hinges anymore and there were little gaps in the diamond-shaped window panes. It was a sad sight indeed.
The hiker walked around the outside of the cottage. Hollyhocks and rose-vines still flourished, and there was even a decent woodpile still. (Many of the previous occupants had been poor-but-honest-woodcutters.) As the hiker poked around the yard (and tripped over a large while rock that looked strangely like a huge bone), clouds rapidly gathered overhead. Indeed, the sky went from a clear blue to black with threatening thunderheads almost in the blink of an eye. With an ear-splitting crash, lightening struck a tree nearby and rain came down as if dumped from an endless wash-tub. The hiker had the presence of mind to grab a large armful of the firewood and run through the rain to the peeling blue door of the little cottage.
The little cottage was dry inside, which was odd since the thatch had looked particularly mangy from the outside, and the door hung better than it had seemed to at first glance. The hiker shoved the door aside and dashed through it, squeezing up against the little nightstand by the bed to shut it. The door shut soundly. The hiker dumped the firewood on the floor by the hearth, and after looking up the chimney to make sure there weren’t any bird’s nests in the way (and getting a few raindrops in the eyes for the trouble), made a small fire in the fireplace.
The little cottage warmed up quickly and the hiker sat on the three-legged stool by the fire and dried off. A spider, curious about the noises it heard, dropped down from the thatch overhead and hung there on its line, looking at the hiker carefully before quickly reeling itself back up and scurrying off to tell the other spiders the good news that there was someone in the cottage to drop down onto again.
Really, the hiker thought, looking around, it wasn’t a bad little cottage even if it was awfully tiny. There was a candle in the candle-stick on the little table with spares on the shelf on the wall. A mug, and bowl, a plate and a spoon, a fork, a knife, a pot, a mixing bowl and a frying pan, a basket, a bucket for water and a small ceramic pot half under the bed for- other things, an axe and a hammer and saw, and a small chest that proved to hold sheets and blankets for the wool-stuffed mattress on the bed (which wasn’t as musty as it should have been, by half) made up the contents of the room. The hiker could see it all from the three-legged stool in front of the fire. It was all in surprisingly good order, and if it weren’t for the miles of dust on everything, the hiker would have thought that someone still lived here.
The rain continued to pour down and finally the hiker decided to settle in a bit. The back pack went on top of the bed for the time being and clearly the only place with space for the spare fire wood was under the bed. As the firewood went under, a strange clanking noise came from under the bed. The hiker peered under the bed, saw a small metal pot hiding there, and reached under to pull it out. It was polished and only a little bit dusty inside. The hiker shrugged and put it beside the fireplace and finished arranging the firewood under the bed. Then the hiker poured some water from a water bottle into the little pot. “Might as well clean it up. At least the water will be good to wash in, even if I don’t want to drink it!” the hiker mused.
The pot was hung over the fire to boil. It sat there and sat there. Finally, the hiker grew frustrated and grumbled, “Boil, little pot, boil!” The little pot shook and bubbling sounds came from within it. A strange smell filled the cottage. It smelled like rice mixed with custard mixed with porridge. The hiker was instantly curious and pulled the pot from the fire. The little pot appeared to be filling first with rice, then with custard, then with porridge. Now the hiker was one of those who had read the old fairy tales in musty old books and realized what was happening, as impossible as it might seem. The changing contents were rapidly approaching the rim of the pot when, “Rice!” the hiker shouted, and then “Little pot, stop!” The rice (the story had been told all three ways, so the little pot really wasn’t sure which one it was supposed to create) had stopped just shy of the top of the pot and sat there steaming and perfectly done. The astounded hiker took a few grains (carefully, because it was very hot) and tasted them. They were perfect. The hiker cautiously ate a mouthful and then waited to see if it would settle before eating any more. You just didn’t know with magical food.
When darkness fell, the rain was still pouring (although the hiker would be surprised to see how dry it was just a few hundred yards from the cottage) so the hiker settled in for the night. The old bed was amazingly comfortable, and the panes that the hiker had thought were gone from the window were there now. The wind whistled around the cottage a bit but the little place was as cozy and tight as could be. The hiker blew out the candle and fell asleep, batting irritably at the ecstatic spider that dropped down from the thatch.
The rain stopped during the night and the morning was a shiny-washed-clean sort of morning. Birds were singing their hearts out in the trees around the clearing, rabbits hopped everywhere and a few does and fawns ambled by the window. The whole place seemed to be putting on a look-at-me-and-see-how-nice-it-is-here sort of show.
The hiker stretched and made some tea and magical porridge for breakfast and sat down on the three-legged stool to write in a journal about the cottage. When the hiker looked up a little while later, the cottage seemed to be a little bit larger. The hiker shrugged. First impressions weren’t always correct. Look how the cottage was in better repair than it had seemed to be at first. (Funny how the magical pot had gone right out of the hiker’s mind for the time being. People tend to dismiss things they don’t understand.)
Finally, the hiker put away the writing things and cleaned up. Everything went back where it belonged. The magic pot went on a shelf instead of under the bed, though, and the firewood stayed under the bed. The hiker pulled the door shut tightly on the way out. The clearing fell silent as the hiker left.
When the hiker got home, thoughts of the little cottage wouldn’t go away. It popped up in dreams, conversations, and a lovely watercolor picture that soon graced the wall of the hiker’s house. Finally the hiker began asking around to see who owned the little place, thinking to buy it.
It turned out that the county owned it, had taken it in lieu of taxes some years back and had never been able to get rid of it afterwards. The hiker purchased it for a song (not literally, mind you – that only happens in fairy tales) and on a sunny day in summer moved a few things out there.
The hiker thought that the little cottage seemed more than a little bit larger today. There was room to close the door without squeezing against the nightstand and there were a table and a rocking chair in the corner that the hiker did not remember being there before. Oh well, it had been almost dark that day. There was also room on the shelves for the box of books the hiker had brought out. A whole rainbow of fairy-tale books and books by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson went up, along with Narnia and Oz and a few other favorites. The hiker had thought that they would be somehow appropriate for the little cottage.
After cleaning away the mountains of dust and arranging things, the hiker sat down at the table that hadn’t been there before with paper and pen. Somehow, writing a story seemed to be the thing to do here. So with a breath of summer and roses coming through the open window, the hiker began to write. It was almost as if the walls of the cottage were so saturated with stories that they were pouring into the hiker – now writer – and out again onto the paper. Hours later, the writer looked up and realized what was happening. Then, grinning, the writer returned to the paper. Later the water colors would come out, too.
Bit by bit the writer moved out to the little cottage permanently. Stories flowed, books were written, pictures were painted, and the little cottage had a purpose again. It might not be the storybook cottage in the stories anymore, but it was the storybook cottage with the stories in it.
It grew, slowly, almost imperceptibly, and finally became a comfortable cottage of several rooms, one just for keeping books and writing in. The writer noticed of course, but by this time, the writer knew that anything was possible and just smiled and kept on writing the stories. The roof stayed thatched and the spiders would often drop down and read the stories being written over the writer’s shoulder until they were batted at and returned to their thatch. And when the occasional dragon or bear or youngest son wandered by, the writer offered them tea and traded stories with them.
-She Wolf © 2008
