The seen and unseen at Halloween

 

Trees, leaves, and tombstones

🍍🍐🍍🍐🍍

My friend Sadie and her husband stored two handmade caskets in their barn for roughly fifteen years. I wrote an earlier post (October 29, 2025) about Harley showing the caskets to visitors, lying down inside to check the fit, and his funeral. At the time I wrote that column, Sadie's casket was still in the barn, but sadly, in May of this year, the casket was transported to the funeral home, and a worker placed her body inside. Sadie was on the way to being eighty-seven years old when her heart stopped beating, and I am hoping that eighty-six was her lucky number. Sadie never said anything to me about lucky numbers, but she was the type of person who might. 

    Unique means rare and uncommon, and that describes Sadie. If the weather permitted us to be outside when I visited, she traipsed around barefoot or sat in the grass while we talked and pulled weeds with her fingers. Lithe and short in stature, she could rise gracefully from the ground well into her eighties. She had an old book of remedies for ailments, and if anyone confided in her about a malady, she could come up with a homegrown treatment. Her creative spirit led her to make wreaths out of magnolia leaves and rugs out of rags. She gave me a kit for hooking a rug using yarn, which I hope to someday tackle in her honor. 

    She lived in a farmhouse built in the seventeenth century, nestled in the midst of hundreds of acres suitable for endless roaming. Soon after I met her, she invited me over, and we roamed in the woods, as she told stories about her Girl Scout leader adventures and recounted historical facts about the property. In her living room, she showed me before and after pictures of the restoration of the house, and somewhere in the conversation, she said, "This house is haunted." Nonchalantly, as though discussing the weather, she talked about screams in the night, noises in the day, and mysterious occurrences in general. One friend, she said, would not come to see her because of being convinced that any house as old as Sadie's had to be haunted, and I am sure that Sadie made no effort to dispel the theory, because my friend found much contentment cohabitating with ghosts. 

Leaving on a jet plane; airports and angst

 A stationary mushroom with running cedar

🌻🌲🌻🌲🌻

Where in the world is Singapore? Singapore is in Southeast Asia, approximately nine thousand seven hundred miles from here. If I aimed to breathe Singapore's sultry air, I would have to drive more than an hour to the closest airport, tiptoe through security, find my seat on a plane, then spend nineteen hours on pins and needles, zipping through the air, hoping and praying to land in one piece on the tarmac at Singapore Changi Airport. I cannot imagine undertaking such a feat, especially the part about spending nearly a day cooped up in an airplane, listening to the roar of those engines. The longest flight I have endured at one stretch is about five hours, and that is plenty long enough for being airborne.

    Located on the other side of the world, Singapore is smaller than Rhode Island, and it takes someone like me twenty minutes to find it on the globe, while squinting through a magnifying glass. English is the most spoken language there, and a few more than six million people reside within its borders. Internet sources describe it as clean, efficient, and conducive to a high quality of life. It has a tropical climate and high humidity. Instead of four seasons like we have here, it experiences two main monsoon seasons and two inter-monsoon seasons in a year. 

    But why am I bringing up Singapore?