Happy Halloween! My favorite holiday! And what a great way to begin the day: there was a terrific ground mist at my place this morning. That low-creeping, slithering kind of fog that you see in old Sherlock Holmes movies. (As an aside, I must take back my prediction that this Halloween would be celebrated in shorts and tank-tops–it’s actually kinda cold! For the first time in four years, I might actually have to bundle up for Halloween! Yeah!) So I stood outside this morning sipping coffee and watching the fog slink through the neighborhood. From my house, our street slopes down toward the Bouldin Creek woods where the road dead ends. This is one of the nice things about my neighborhood–we’re relatively closed off to the rest of the world. This is a good thing because the rest of the immediate world consists of acres and acres and acres of two- and three-story apartment buildings. Apartment Valley, I call it. Quite attractive, no? From my driveway looking north, I can see one of the various apartment complexes across the top of the Bouldin Creek woods. This morning, the complex was swallowed up by the fog. I took a deeeeeep breath. The wet air felt great in my lungs, and the crisp, ripe smell of morning made me wish I could stay home from work and drink coffee and read all day.

But, that’s not the way things work. So, I started up my trusty little orange Beetle and headed in to work. The fog was lifting in most places and the yellow-orange Fall sun lit up everything along the Interstate. Until I got to the river. Suddenly, the city disappeared. The fog was amazing and thick. It was like someone had ripped all the stuffing out of a million pillows and piled it all on the river. Within a distance of about 200 yards, I crossed over from a bright October morning to a dull and mysterious counterworld. The driver’s window on my Beetle doesn’t work properly so I tend to leave it down most of the time. It can be rolled up with a lot of tugging and cussing. So, as usual, the window was down this morning and I could feel the heavy wet air swirling into the car. I wanted to pull over along the river, kill the engine, and just read. (Basically, anything to keep me from having to go to work! Am I pathetic, or what?)

I’m now at work. I’ve offered up a batch of Halloween cookies to my co-workers that Ari and Julien made on Monday night. Everyone seems to be in reasonably good spirits (no pun intended). And sitting at my computer I can see through the big window to my right that the fog is getting thicker. It probably won’t last the day, so I’m going to go out and soak it in while I can. I can see the perfect yellow-white orb of the sun burning through the mist. When I get up from my desk to go stand on the back dock in a moment, I truly expect to see a few of the undead in their brittle bandages and deteriorating limbs walking through the parking lot. I’ll think for a moment, “I’m glad I’m not trapped in a supermarket right now,” a distant memory of Stephen King’s short story, “The Mist.” But then I’ll turn to head back inside and think, “Actually, being trapped in a supermarket with monsters might be kinda fun right about now.” And then I’ll go back to work.

I was hoping to compile a few ghost stories to post here today, but I have an article due tomorrow so I’ll just point you to ghost stories I posted last year. Enjoy!

Ghost Stories.