I’m listening to Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places while I work on this afghan and it’s really good. It has me thinking a lot about how places become haunted and what it means to be haunted as well as the components Americans expect in a ghost story in order to believe that it’s true.
He’s really good at teasing out some of the racial components. I wish he were better about teasing out some of the gender components. But overall, I’m enjoying the shit out of it.
This morning, I just walked the dog up and down the driveway because the storms last night had made the ground too wet to walk across. This was my view:
Back behind those two trees is the concrete ditch the creek that runs through my yard has been forced into. The muck you’re looking at here is what remains after a night in which the creek returns to its old ways.
It feels like a ghost, like my yard is haunted by the old path of the creek. And it’s real and true. My yard is haunted by the old path of the creek. Sometimes, like last night with all the storms, a creek appears in the old spot and moves through the land in the old ways, and then vanishes again.
So much we think is gone for good, irrevocably destroyed, comes back in ways that are unsettling. Why should the dead be any different?
Tiny Cat Pants 