Back up at the cabin again. It feels like home now, if you know what I mean. Last week, I saw the leaves changing on the trees at the mouth of the canyon, almost an hour away from here. Today, the leaves right outside my window are half green and half yellow.
A lot of people love the changing of the leaves. And I get it--the colors are beautiful, the light quality changes, there's something magical about everything--but I'm like my mom in that I'm always reminded that winter is coming ("all dwarves are bastards in the eyes of their fathers"), and that soon, it will be cold and miserable outside, and not long after that, I will be cold and frozen in a coffin somewhere.*
Up here, the weather is absolutely perfect. I checked, and it's 76 degrees outside, 68 degrees in the cabin. Only my cousin could complain about that, and the warmth of the sun on the back deck means I'll really enjoy reading once I get around to it. Even so, I wish you were here to share it with me. I talk to myself often, but sometimes the conversation gets awfully repetitive.
There's an old sink down in the basement that's always cold, so every time I come here, I put water in it (or there's still water in it from the last time) and I put a couple of sodas in it to chill during my visit. Today, there was no water there, so I started to fill it, when I smelled something: it would seem my nephew cleaned a bunch of fish in that sink over the weekend, and the scales and smell are still there. I didn't want to soak my sodas in that, so I scrubbed it and tried to get it as clean as I could. But it was pretty gross. Guess it's better than discovering a toilet was that way, but still.
Last week, I put in a DVD called ESCAPE FROM FORT BRAVO from the 1950s. It's a Western, with a fort out in Arizona Territory where the Union Army has a bunch of Confederate soldiers as prisoners, and there's the strangest relationship between the two groups I've ever seen documented. At one point, the main character, a Northern Captain (William Holden, who I remember from THE OMEN 2), and his opposite, a Reb Captain (John Forsythe, who I remember from "Dynasty"), go to a dance at the fort, and both compete over the same woman (even though one of them is a prisoner of the other).
It's got a pretty great premise, where the Union soldiers and the Confederate soldiers have to team up against rampaging Indians, and I can't help but try to think of how to transplant that into a Sci-Fi or Horror setting (there aren't enough Civil War-era monster movies, I say), but I have to admit that I fell asleep right before the end.
Sit-ups Today: 250
Sit-ups In September: 2262
Push-ups Today: 39
Push-ups In September: 552
I don't know if I ever blogged about this, but there's a hill directly behind this cabin, and atop it sits another cabin, oh, I'd say a hundred yards away (maybe less, I don't judge distances well). And last year, I was here, reading out on the back deck, when I heard a sound from that cabin. I looked up, and there's a porch swing on their own back deck, and the wind was making it move back and forth. So I went back to my reading, when I heard it again, bumping against the wood. I looked up, and thought I saw . . . well, the shadows made it look like somebody was sitting there, but I knew there was no one up there, so I went back to reading.
But then I stopped, and looked around me. None of the trees or weeds were moving in any breeze, so it wasn't wind that was making that swing go back and forth. I looked again, and that person-like shape was still there, sitting in the swing. I stood up and walked to the end of our deck--which was three yards at most--to get a better look. And yes, there was someone--what looked like an old woman--sitting in that porch swing.
Now, if you know me, you know three things: 1) I'm a dreamer, 2) I often damage my buttocks by doing too many sit-ups, and 3) I'm deathly afraid of old women.** So of course, it freaked me out to know she was there (if she was really there), sitting, swinging in silence, perhaps watching me, perhaps criticizing what little writing I'd gotten done this trip, perhaps chuckling at the smallness of my private parts, perhaps reflecting bitterly on how she died many years ago on a night just like this one.
I came up here every ten days or so last year, and every other trip, I'd see her--or someone like her--sitting in that porch swing, judging me and staring malevolently . . . or perhaps completely unaware I was even there.
Cut to Plague Year 2020. I come up here every Wednesday (give or take two), and sit out on that back deck every time (give or take last week). And once, back in June, I thought I saw her, but until today, I was pretty safe. But today, she was back, along with grandchildren, and a husband who must be even older than she is, because he kept making the most TERRIBLE sounds. Wet, phlegmy, hacking, thick sounds, like he'd swallowed a bottle of molasses that had a bunch of slugs in it. I was reading the Coben book (still very enjoyable), but my whole body would go rigid (and not in the good way) every time he'd make his coughing-up-big-chunks-of-lung sound, until I finally put my book away and went back in the cabin.
You see, there are worse things than ghosts in this world.
Words Today: 742
Words In September: 17,374
*I really would like to be cremated, though, and have my ashes spread in the ocean like my Uncle Jim (or awful Brekkyn Manyon at the end of "A Lovely Singing Voice"). I love the ocean like you love the autumn leaves. Plus, it'll save my family the price of a coffin--those suckers are expensive.
**Okay, all women. But especially the old ones.
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