Do you ever get the feeling that some things you encounter while going about your normal, day-to-day business, are just slightly too unusual to be part of REAL life.  And for a brief moment you feel certain, with perhaps only a shadow of a doubt, that these  . . . apparitions . . . have leaped straight from the pages of a story and have entered your world for the sole purpose of adding a little bit of intrigue to your otherwise mundane day?

Allow me to give you an example.  The other day, I was driving Aiden to his sitter’s house before heading to work.  It was a hot, muggy, 80 degree morning with very little breeze.  We had gone only two blocks from our house when I see a woman on a bicycle – something that shouldn’t give me any cause for a second thought.  But I knew, upon seeing this woman was that she was not an ordinary part of my day.  My very first thought when I saw her was that she was a witch in disguise.  Now, this is not something I purposefully conjured up, with my overly vivid imagination.  It was an immediate intuition.  There was nothing startlingly strange about her, but there were some oddities.  Her bicycle had a basket on the front.  She wore a drab brown hoodie with the hood pulled low over her head – bear in mind the weather – and large vintage looking sunglasses.  Her features were extremely defined and protruding and she DID have a large wort on her chin that I could see from my vantage point behind the wheel.  But for me to pass a complete stranger and think, “Huh, a witch.  I wonder what she’s doing in our world,” seems a bit neurotic.  I don’t know whether it was the fact that I was considering her so carefully, or perhaps there was some strange truth to my conjecture about her, but her eyes followed me till she was looking over her shoulder on her bicycle and I had turned the corner.  I have never seen her before or since in our neighborhood.  Why I had such a strong reaction to her, I’ll never know.  The logical side of my brain has convinced me, since that day, that what I saw was nothing more than a woman on a bicycle.  The fantastical side of my brain, however, begs to disagree and has spent the better part of several days’ quiet moments playing out stories in my mind about the witch in disguise. I’ll leave you to imagine what the details of those stories may be, but I will tell you they have made the last few days far more fun :)

So here’s to noticing oddities, never taking them for granted, and giving the childlike side of your mind leeway to believe the unbelievable, even if just for a moment.