Mabel had just been on a very long trip. She’d spent years living in another country and now she was moving back to her hometown. Her family helped her find a place, and it sure was special, but it had its downsides.

The house itself was pretty tiny, or at least the overall planning of it was weird. It felt like a Picasso painting at times, because the kitchen was pretty small and the living room was huge. There was no real bedroom either, so her bed was suited up in a hallway of a kind.

The house was up on a hill, but it was also connected to an old barn. The whole barn was integrated into the hill in some weird way. The tiny house sat upon the barn and to get to the main entrance of the house you’d have to take a long set of stairs to get there. Behind the house there was a forrest and if you walked through it, you’d eventually get to a big lake and up there you’d find a water park that was really popular with the tourists. In front of the tiny house, after you’d come up the stairs, there was a path into the forrest and around the house. There was a huge sign with an arrow pointing to “water park”, but it was usually very ignored by others.

The barn had two big openings at each ends of it. One said “shop” and the other said “café”. The shop area was like a farmers market, but indoors and you could easily see all the tables and giant boxes that were filled with freshly grown vegetables, fruit and on the shelves behind the counter were massive bags of grains, such as flour and rice and wheat.

Unwanted house guests

The rent was cheap. I’d say it was basically free. Her family owned the store and the café inside the barn and Mabel got to live in that tiny, weird house without worrying about money or paying rent. She’d get her food from the store without having to pay for it as well and sometimes she’d go there to get complete meals and desserts.

The reason for the rent being basically zero was that the house came with a huge and even weirder downside. For all those people that wanted to visit that water park, they had to actually go through the house! That meant that unwanted visitors could show up at any time of day, because the park was open 24/7 all year round.

Mabel worried about getting robbed, but luckily she never was. It was just annoying that she’d have to leave the door unlocked, so that the tourists could get through to the park. There were many times when she gotten home and the door just opened and 10+ people just poured out of her home after a visit to the water park. She was really annoyed by this.

Especially since there was a path in front of the house, going around it and into the forest, along with a huge sign that pointed to the water park. But everybody seemed to ignore it. Even Mabel’s family. It was like she was the only person in the whole world that could see that path and that sign. When she mentioned it to her family, they all starred at her like she was an alien creature from another planet, or had to be hospitalized, due to her craziness, but yeah. The sign actually was there, and so was the path.

Pancake Party

One day, there was a celebration for her nieces and nephews. They were gonna turn 5, 6 and 2. The nieces were twins. They’d ordered a pancake party, and Mabel got the job to make the batter and fry them up. She made hundreds and hundreds of pancakes. It took a whole day to make and prepare them. There were many kids coming to this pancake mania party.

But what do you think happened instead? Well, as soon as all the party preparations were done, and all the guests were supposed to arrive, a gang of tourists going to the water park showed up and basically ate all of the pancakes! Mabel was furious, but the weird thing was that her family didn’t care about that. “The more the merrier”, they’d said. Yeah, sure, Mabel thought. Those pancakes were for the kids! Not the unwanted people that go through my house at all hours of the day?!

But nobody cared. It turned into a real chaos and there was no pancake party for the kids. After it was all done, the pancakes were eaten – the whole house was a huge mess. There was whipped cream and jam on the ceiling. Paper plates and napkins spread all over the place and the yard. Paintings were crooked and the refrigerator door was open. The milk was spilled all over the floor and some apples had run away into the living room.

Mabel sat in the kitchen and almost cried. She could not believe that nobody listened to her. They just ate her pancakes that she spent so many hours on making and then she had to clean up the mess herself? That’s crazy, right?

Well, Mabel was a good girl and she spent the weekend cleaning up her place. After she was done, she forced all of her family members out of there and thankfully enough, they listened and left.

After a nap or so, she went down to the store, bought some more apples and ingredients to make an apple crumble pie. She went home, made the pie and ate it, and said;

“Well, that’s life, right?”.