and look! i'm not dead!

Saturday, 12:30am: So I'm sitting here in the dreamy little house at the end of the road in the woods where I'm housesitting, it's late at night, and I've just finished watching a movie on my laptop. Suddenly I hear a car door slam. Nearby. Now this makes me sit up and take notice, because this house is literally at the end of the road. Not even the road; it's at the end of a little side path that cuts off someone's driveway and goes around that house and then ends at this house. This house is not one that you just happen to end up at accidentally.

So a car door slamming at 12:30am is more than a little weird. My first thought is about the fact that I left my keys in my unlocked car in the driveway (this is how out-in-the-woods I am) and some vagrant has come out of the woods to steal it. So I get up to run out the door, thinking, I suppose, that I'm going to chase the thief down the road (dressed for the occasion in my fleece-lined running tights and big Macalester sweatshirt and nerdy-chic glasses, the combination of which will no doubt inspire fear in the hearts of man and beast), and just then I hear the creak of the screen door.

Now I'm thinking, "hmm... I might be ready to die, but I'd really rather not..." and then I see two faces on the other side of the door, a smiling man and woman, looking suddenly rather unsure of themselves. So I open the door, they introduce themselves and say they're friends of the owners of said house in the woods, and ask if I'm the babysitter. I explain that, no, I'm the housesitter, and the family is gone for the weekend.

They tell me that they're from Maine but have been down in Northampton, MA (45-ish minutes south of here) because she is auditioning to be lead singer of a band. Now they need a place to crash. They ask if I'd heard the phone messages they left earlier in the evening, which I sort of had but hadn't really paid attention to since I was watching a movie on the couch. They now understand why they hadn't heard back. We agree that had I gone out dancing this evening as I'd originally planned, and returned home later than this, as I probably would have, to find two total strangers in the house, that would have been very, very bad.

So, what happened next? Of course. They crashed in the extra bedroom in the basement. Because if it was all really a cover story for an intended axe-murder, it was quite an impressive one. But they didn't kill me in my sleep, so they stayed here again last night. Now we're all sitting here drinking coffee, about to eat some eggs that I picked out of the henhouse this morning, making plans for me to come visit them in Maine sometime this summer.

Here's to making new friends under the most hilarious of circumstances.