We’re just a few days into November, and it’s already weird.
Weirder. The last three years have been pretty darn weird, and getting ever
weirder, but I’m talking about my personal life here.
First, I got up one day just before Hallowe’en and
discovered a witch in my yard: the DitchWitch, and the guys who run it, who dug
a shallow trench, put some cable into it, and then covered it all up again. Fun
to watch – one of them walks beside the machine and steers it with what looks a
lot like a big joystick, and the machine digs the trench and poops out cable
into it; and on the trip back, fills the trench in and covers up the cable. The
Witch is a heavy-looking thingie, and it’s also really accurate, which amazes
me. It was kind of like watching the driver walking next to a gas-fired ox.
Cool.
The Witch was there because the company that provides our
Wi-Fi service has been insisting for months that if we don’t switch to their new
cable-based system, which is supposed to provide much faster computer power,
they were going to cut us off October 1. So, since mid-September, we’ve
received, and responded to, at least two calls per week from them offering dire
warnings and saying we need to sign some sort of approval form, which they hadn’t actually sent to us. About half-way through October they emailed it, The Husband e-signed it
and returned it, and thereafter, every couple of days we received a phone
call from the company saying we need to sign the form and return it to them,
blah, blah, blah. And calls from someone
else in the company saying that now they have the form, the Witch would arrive November 5 to put in the cable.
Communications company is clearly having trouble communicating with itself!
While all this calling was going on, someone came half-way
through October and sprayed bright orange markings on the ground, after
determining where our telephone and electric wires (which are buried) run. Then
the next week, someone else came and spray-painted white markings on the ground
that didn’t correspond to the orange ones. Then just before Hallowe’en, the
Witch arrived and dug the trench and laid the cable somewhere in the vague
vicinity of the white marks, except where they didn’t.
Now it’s November 7, and we’re still using the old Wi-Fi
they were going to cut off Oct. 1, and we’ve stopped getting phone calls from
anyone in the company. Hmmm.
Hallowe’en day I wasn’t working, so I filled up my plastic
Jack-O’Lantern bucket with rubber snakes and centipedes and spiders, and
eyeballs and skulls and star anise, got out my staff, which has lots of
trailing, floaty cloth scraps, vampire
teeth, bones the First Hound had buried in my garden, a bag of skulls and two
chains of skulls and a bag of star anise, and some dried Love Lies Bleeding
attached to it; and then put on the Dark Lady costume, which involves long
black velvet gloves, a long black skirt and jacket, and lots of veils that you
can’t quite see through, and went to run errands. Everywhere I went I offered whoever I encountered
the opportunity to take “a trick for Hallowe’en luck” from my bucket.
I went a lot of places: the library, post office, quick
mart, café, farmstand, co-op, grocery store, veterinarian clinic, dog beauty
parlor, farm supply store, garden store, garage, pottery shop, another café,
Dunkin’ Donuts, the other co-op, and round about. It was fascinating to see how
people reacted: some pretended not to see me; some peered deeply through the
veils trying to see if they knew me; some shrieked and ran; some giggled
nervously, some refused to put their hands into the bucket because the contents
freaked them out, some followed me around to see how other people would react,
some tried to pretend there was nothing weird going on, some took photos when they thought I wasn't looking, and several thanked me
for coming in and making their day more fun.
The reaction I liked best was the
older woman at the post office who laughed and laughed and shrieked and asked me all sorts of
questions and told me she loved my costume. By the time the kids came out in
their costumes at dusk, I was home, with an empty bucket. Next time the Dark Lady gets
to go out, she needs to bring more spiders, skulls, eyeballs and star anise (I
give those to the people who are too scared to reach in and take something),
and some bats, and no centipedes and snakes.
I haven’t had so much fun in ages!
In my garden, I finally yanked out the fava beans and
started cutting out the spent raspberry canes and putting down hay. I stored
the bird bath and brought in the solar lights; and cut the sunflowers the birds
have emptied of seeds. One morning last week, I counted 11 goldfinches and three chickadees all working at once on the sunflower plant just outside our bathroom window.
I put in two new short paths; and I’ve planted the
perennials that have come, and cussed out the company that still hadn’t sent
the rest of them – they arrived yesterday and today, just in time for our first
snow, and are now living in the vegetable cooler until I can do something about
them this weekend. I can’t convince
these plant companies that I live in zone 3, not zone 5.
The calendula, and pincushion plant, and mints and catnip
are still blooming and looking lovely in the garden. I can’t bring myself to
yank out the annual calendula, it’s so happily doing its’ thing, in spite of
the wickedly cold weather we’ve been having.
One last weird thing: last weekend, after getting our
electricity back that the windstorm had crashed for about 36 hours, I spent a
day in the kitchen cooking up some stuff that I worried had been not quite cold
enough for too long, and also made this week’s soup. This week’s soup was a French
onion soup – but I didn’t check first to be sure I had a bottle of red wine to put in it. When I had the soup ready except for the wine, I discovered that all I
had in the pantry was a bottle of sparkling moscato in a blue bottle.
OK, that’s a little odd, but the sparkling would cook out,
and moscato would taste ok, it’d just make the soup a little sweeter than usual. I
pulled the cork and poured the wine into the soup, and discovered that the wine
itself was blue – and the blue didn’t cook out. This week I’m eating a lovely
blue-green onion soup, which tastes fine but is doing a number on my brain
whenever I take a bite.
Weird.
Deb Marshall photos
7 November, 2019
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