I stopped dead in my tracks en route to getting coffee this morning when I saw a hearse. On Halloween. With Dracula in the window and an impressive spider on the roof. The license plate said New Hampshire — "Live Free or Die" — and depicted that poor Old Man in the Mountain, whom I still miss whenever I travel north on that stretch of Route 93. Perhaps the driver had ventured from NH to NPT to attend The Undertakers' Ball at the Elks last night. That'd be my guess, as the hearse was parked on that very block, near the Old Stone Mill, and the Elks' party is a big deal. But I pushed on, with nary another thought about mysterious/precarious stone structures, as coffee is a BIGGER deal. To me, anyway: both intrinsically (I do love coffee) and extrinsically (one never knows what or whom one might see). Like the other morning, when a clerk at "A" Market — the natural foods store on Bellevue where they happen to have good coffee and even better muffins — asked me what I was going to be for Halloween. I shrugged; I had no intention of being anything (other than myself), so I re-routed the question to her:
"What are you going to be??"
"Mother Nature."
That made sense, given her place of work. We even talked about how she would execute it (with lots of leaves). Then I went on my way, thinking Mother Nature was a really good idea, and that it'd be even better if paired with Father Time, though I'm not sure how one would execute the latter. With an assortment of watches and a long white beard?? I had half a mind to go back and suggest to the clerk/cashier/associate/whatever that if she had a boyfriend/partner/husband/whatever, he might want to think about it. But I didn't. I just went home with my coffee and muffin — hooray for small pleasures — just in time to notice a rather large spider web woven between the bushes, but the weaver was nowhere in sight. I imagine she was tucked in the greenery somewhere. And that she was watching. Creepy. Unless she was the one who rode down from NH on (which sure beats in) the hearse ...
