The Lake Superior Writer's Retreat

A small one-room cabin sits on top of a dune overlooking Lake Superior. Local legend holds it belonged to a writer. It’s not really a cabin, just a glassed-in lean-to which this writer supposedly built as a retreat. When walking the beach, you can see the top of the glass enclosure. Knowing the rumors of his mysterious death by drowning along with the sad truth that the dead have no privacy, I climbed the dune to see what the inside of a writer’s cabin overlooking a vast body of water looks like.

 

A grill sat beside the door next to a weather-beaten bench. I pressed my face to the glass. The inside was cluttered and desolate. It wasn’t at all cozy, as I had envisioned, only abandoned and sad. A crookneck lamp sat on a table beside the window but nothing else beyond clutter was recognizable. Nothing to indicate a writer ever worked here. No reams of paper, no lost manuscript, no rejections taped to the wall. Who were his heirs to let this writer’s retreat fall into ruin? What did he write? Poetry? Murder mysteries? Ghost stories of the lost at sea? Lake Superior never gives up her dead, but still, I envied him his writer’s retreat on the top of a dune.

Written for Poets and Storytellers Friday Writings, whose only stipulation is that we include the word cozy in whatever way feels right.

This is a true story.