But it isn't—it isn't a winter's day.  It is a cloudy autumn afternoon, and I am walking through the edge of the woods.  I don't see any spiders, but I keep walking through clinging spider lines.  As I move down the path they stretch and break, and I hear tiny snapping sounds.

But I don't—not really.  Because I am not in the woods:  I am standing at the edge of very deep water.  The sound I hear is the lapping of little waves around my ankles.  I wade in a little ways.  I hope I don't meet up with any bloodsuckers.  Where I am standing, the water is clear over clean sand, no dead leaves or tree-shade.  Good—then I am probably safe.  I wade in deeper and deeper.  I am almost in over my head.  I draw in a breath, enough to last for as long as it takes, and then—and then—

That was only a moment ago, but already all that is over my shoulder.  I am now in another place.

To know that comes as a great relief.  I am always a wee bit troubled while I am in between, because I have learned that sometimes the things I think about by accident will come along with me, and how skittish and mean a thought can be.  Sometimes the most unpleasant ones will dart across one's mind.  That is the way it is when I am sleepy and on the verge of dreaming.  I try with all my might to see a summery field and horses, and suddenly my dream-to-be is interrupted by the appearance of some interfering face.

But this time I made it across in good form.  Now I am almost there.  I am walking down the path toward my house—my other  house.

My cousin told me about this place a long time ago.  I was wanting to hear a ghost story.  That's like me; I always do.  He knows so many stories of every kind.  On this occasion, he said that someone else had told him once about a house way back in the hills—not far from where he lived as the crow flies, but a long way in country miles, and a further way back in time.  A man and a woman lived there, two old hermit sort of people who kept almost no other human company.  Once the people in the nearest town noticed that neither of them

had been around to buy supplies in ages, and they figured that something must be wrong.  They sent someone out to check, and their suspicions were gratified.

Even after what I heard then, or maybe, truth be told, because of it, that sounded like a fine house to me.  I could see it with my mind's clear sight: a lonely old house of weathered grey wood with two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs, an attic with a little round window, a porch with a bit of spoolwork trim, and louvered wooden shutters on all the windows that you could peek through without being seen.  Aye, far back in the country, well off the main road, and it was said to be haunted.  A person, or two well-suited persons, could live there seemingly alone without ever being lonely.

As soon as I had the full picture of this house set in my mind, I knew I could find the way there.  I set out as soon as I was tucked in for the night, after saying my own sort of prayers.  Early on I found out that I could get there by several ways.  The first night I tried repeatedly until I found out that nothing I was doing was wrong except that I was giving up too soon.  You never think it is working until you round just one more bend, and there it is.  Later I went back and tried all the several approaches again, and almost all of them led me there.  But the first time, I must admit, for awhile I felt lost.

Once I was there and sure of it, I walked up and tried the door.  If it had been locked, there would have been a whole new set of problems, but it swung open easily.  I had a homecoming feeling, as though the house just wanted me there.  It seemed it ought to be that way, but you know how things can go.  This time it all came right of itself like a work of the noble hand of fate.  That was my hand on the doorknob.  I stepped across the threshold and there I was.

Later I woke up happy and sad, because I had been inside my other house but that was as far as I had gone.  The next few nights, as I recall, were no good for trying as company came and I had to share my bed with my sister.   The thought of the house just lay there on my mind until they went away and all the while I could feel it growing, becoming clearer and stronger.  I never rest very well when anyone else is in the room, so by the time I had it to myself again, I was so tired I fell asleep before I was even halfway there.  That was all right; the last thing I saw before I closed my eyes was the round Moon shining between the curtains.  Then right away I had a dream that I was standing in a cave with a man and a woman, and we were looking up at the Moon through a hole in the roof.  As we watched, a line of bright misty light passed over the face of the Moon three times, and the man said he could see it spelling out letters.  He told the woman beside him what they were, and she wrote them down.  I could neither see them clearly nor hear them as he recited them, but when I woke up I knew that this was about the window in my new old house.  I don't know how I knew that; the knowing just came with the dream.

In my cousin's story, there were two uncanny things about this house: what was in the closet, and what was on the table.   Part of the furnishings had been left in place when the old people turned up missing—missing from their supply runs to town, that is; their whereabouts were eventually known.  One thing that was left was a heavy kitchen table.   The few foolhardy souls who had returned to ransack the place after the earthly mystery was solved were several times terrified to find on that table plates of nicely served fresh food—but served how?  By whom?  For what purpose?  It could hardly not be an evil thing.  After enough of them had witnessed this to corroborate one another's tale, that was the end of the raids.  No one ever entered that house again as far as anyone thereabouts knew.

The contents of the closet were of course the reason for the food, although beyond that connection in itself the food made no sense at all.  I don't mean to keep you in suspense:  The man and woman who lived in that house were found inside the closet, hanging by their necks from ropes tied onto spikes driven solidly into the beams of the floor above.  There wasn't the slightest sign of struggle.  Everyone assumed that they had both committed suicide.  The thought appealed to me.  According to my cousin, the bodies were left there to hang.  Suicides can't be buried in hallowed ground as their mortal remains are unclean.  No one even wanted to touch them.  They had no family anyway, so who was to complain?  The house was closed up with them inside it, and so it stayed, until trespassers broke the lock.

I have no way of knowing when all that happened.  My cousin only said that the house was still standing.  He claimed that he had seen it—from a long way up the road.  That was enough for me.  I knew I would have to find a way to go.  I hate like poison to be near enough to see a ghost and not get to walk right through it and feel its touch.  These ghosts I could already see in the back of my mind's eye just like sunshine, light through a filmy window with sun motes dancing.  Those were my ghosts.  I harbor an aspiration of living way back in the country with just my mate for company, him and some scriptures and verse.  That was why I was lying abed running through my sacred memories for signs that would show the safe passageway.  Eventually most of them led me through, as long as they led me at some point through water.

I recall what was on the plates on the table the first time I went inside.  It was simple fare, some broken bread and butter and cheese, and something that got inside me in a way I like to think about:  On each of the plates were two apple quarters.  It did look fresh, but not undisturbed, although I won't say what that might mean.  It looked all there but not altogether untouched.  Well, I might be thinking ahead.  You have no way of knowing what I have seen since then.

For just a little while I stood there studying the plates, wondering if, now that I had found the house, I really had the courage to open the closet door and look inside.  The door was pushed to but it wasn't latched.  What if it’s become warped and stuck, I wondered for a second.  Then I reached out and pulled and it came open easily and there they were.  The woman was wearing a calico dress that was printed with green leaves and purple clusters—flowers or berries, you couldn't tell which anymore.  The man had on a black serge suit that was so moth-eaten you could see some cocoons underneath the edge of the lapel.  You couldn't have told them apart without their clothes, although I suppose the man's bones were longer.  They were skeletons, with a few scraps of papery skin and little snarled wads of hair.  Some of the skin and hair had fallen in little dry piles on the floor.  The rest looked like it would go with a breath or if you reached forward and swayed them.  Something was holding the bones all together—nothing looked like it was missing.  The rope seemed to be in good shape too.  But I wasn't trusting appearances.  I closed the door very carefully and tiptoed softly away.

I wanted to dream about the house that night, but in the morning I couldn't remember anything I dreamt except an argument with my mother.  She was saying I was still too young to pin up my hair.  I didn't have to fall asleep to argue that with her.  That was the sort of thing she was given to yelling about every day.  Patience is a virtue, I tell myself.  Virtue is not my long suit yet but I am getting there.  When it was bedtime again I knew what to do and I moved along quickly.  I soon fell into the habit of falling asleep in the front upstairs room of my house—my other house, I mean.  That was the prettiest room, with a four-poster bedstead and faded soft blue wallpaper.  I am sort of making up this part.  It's what they call poetic license, but I tend to think I am being truthful enough as I left in the part about the wads of hair on the floor.  It is how I like to picture the room that the man and woman must have slept in.  Don't ask me why I never minded the thought of sleeping in their bed while they were hanging downstairs.  It isn't that I don't know the answer.  I do, but I haven't gotten there yet.

This is how things went along for quite awhile, until I was finally sure I was dreaming about my house and the man and woman and their times.  The food on the table was always changing.  It was never anything fancy; maybe some bread and preserves or berries and such.  I wondered and wondered how it got there.  In my dreams I thought about that food, but I never could remember what I thought, so I never got anywhere.  Once in a dream I saw my teacher wearing an old black serge suit, and he reached out and hugged me.  That was a wonderful dream—if I would hug anybody anyway, he would be the one.  Well, of course I know he isn't really the one.  Another time I was wading through a stream with a man who was singing in riddles.  I woke up with a line in my head about a crack in an eye of glass.  I never could  say quite what it meant, except that when I thought about it, a cool breeze blew like a silver cloud through a little gap inside me somewhere and it put me in mind of the sparks jumping off the ends of the Christmas tree icicles onto my fingers.  Any fool can see that those things run together, but saying it—that is just hard.

Meanwhile, as all this was happening, I was doing something else, and I knew it just as well.  I tried my own would-be virtuous patience over it every day.  I did want to pin up my hair, and my mother wouldn't let me yet.  I wanted everything else that comes with a full-grown woman's estate.  She was always warning me that when all of it finally came, I would want to send a few things back, but that is another matter, unfortunately.  In the thick of all these changes came a different but somehow related change.

One night I fell asleep on the way to my house, while I was in the water.  I slipped into a brief clear dream that I was sitting on a patch of green lawn beside my old companion.  I knew that's who he was the way I knew about the cave in my earlier dream:  the knowing was part of the dreaming.  We were eating a simple supper outdoors because it was such a fine evening.  He knew so many verses and songs, and sometimes he would forget he was eating and get started singing and tip his plate and bits of food would slide off.  I couldn't let them go to waste, not being dirty really, having touched mostly only the grass.  Neither could I be so rude as to put them back on his plate, so I took them for myself.  Will it make sense to you that I sort of liked to do this, gathering little pieces of fallen food the way I gathered the songs that fell from his mouth?  As if by doing this, I could learn to be more like him.  That was all the dream.

In a little while, he sent another—a very much better dream.  We were outdoors in the garden again, sitting on the ground.  He offered me a bite of food, something I had not noticed him eating.  It was strange—a hard red bricklike cube, about an inch or so long.  'What is it?' I asked, when he gave it to me.  He smiled.  'Compressed horse blood', he said.  'It's good.'   Or really, I think he said 'mare's blood'.   I wondered how to eat it.  Should I try to bite it in half?  He knew what I was thinking.  'Just swallow it whole', he told me.  'It will slide right down; you'll see.'  I did as he told me, and he was right.  It vanished away on my tongue, just a salt taste for a moment and then it was over.  He was watching me intently.  I started feeling myself swell up inside.  The feeling kept getting bigger and bigger until I thought I would explode.  And then I did—not like an overripe cherry, but like a swelling bud bursting into a rose.  That is exactly what happened to me—from the top of my head and out the ends of my fingers, great red roses burst forth.   I was fairly gasping, I was that amazed, even in a dream where such strange things are bound to occur.  Then he smiled at me very sweetly and said, 'You see, I have better fare for you than my leavings all covered with grass and dirt.'   It was while I was waking that I knew what I knew.

I could see the two of them go inside and set their plates on the table, the food on the woman's a little dirty from falling to the ground.  Then they went close together up the narrow stairs and into the pretty bedroom.  The wallpaper then was blue as the sky and the ceiling was white as the clouds.  It was only early evening, not even dusk, but they were going to bed, and I could understand why.  They had a secret to share between them that went with white sheets and feathers.

I understood another secret, too: who left those offerings.  Who kept going back and leaving them, although the people were done with food.  That was me who was sitting beside him in the garden, and it was me who was standing at the foot of the stairs remembering the way they used to mount them together.  That quick disappearing salt taste of blood was an echo on my tongue that told me that nothing could ever have made me forget.  There was a memory once of another place that lay between him and me like a pall of forgetfulness, but that was just the early morning fog in my head of a childhood in my mother's earthly household.  And that childhood was at its close.

What was opening here like the red rose flowers on my head and hands was a certain power of seeing in uncertain light .  Through all this daylight world has to offer I will carry the one thought of him and his songs in the hollow Moon cavern just under my breath until we stand there together.  The line of light goes around three times like a stroke of lightning that bends, and then it forms letters.  Songs for the hearing, songs for the sight:  He is the song everlasting.  I have known him and I have found him again.

I know where we left ourselves hanging.  This morning I will bind up my hair and my mother will not say me nay.