Sweet Dreams

Chamberlain Maine is one of those tiny summer vacation communities where everyone knows everyone and all the houses go back two or three generations in a family. If your family doesn't already own a home here your only hope of getting in is to marry someone whose family does.
Chamberlain is the kind of summer resort town on the water where all the houses have names. The one we're staying in is very accurately referred to as the Yellow Cottage but we're surrounded by less descriptively specific homes with names like Sea Owl, Gray Gull, and Shore Leave.
Chamberlain is the kind of place where the next-door neighbor's have a son who is also four years old and the boy's mother, whose name is Patsy, invites your son over to play and makes him egg salad for lunch.
Chamberlain is a place where the stars blaze at night and the milky way is visible like a reverse rainbow which ends at a distant lighthouse instead of a pot of gold.
Inside the Yellow Cottage none of the plates or silverware match. The assortment of drinking glasses contains one of the old Archie jam-jar glasses just like my aunt used to have. My personal favorite is the mug with the chinook salmon on it that I've been taking my tea out of for the past three days.
The Yellow Cottage is full of shell art and painted rocks created by grandchildren long since grown up.
The Yellow Cottage has an outhouse. Actually, because the Yellow Cottage is really two cottages put together, it has two bathrooms, but Adria said today during the power outage that the outhouse was always available should we run out of water for flushing. The outhouse comes equipped with two back issues of The New Yorker - just because one doesn't have indoor plumbing doesn't necessarily make one a primitive thinker.
And - the Yellow Cottage has wireless access! No doubt that's because next-door-neighbor Patsy is a lawyer who used to work in Washington DC but now works from her home in Maine; which just goes to show that one should never underestimate people named Patsy.

song: Sweet Dreams • artist: Patsy Cline