Don't forget the flashlight.

When you visit a neighbor's house here, you cannot forget to bring a flashlight if you know you'll be leaving there after dark. When it's dark up in these hills, it's Dark. Capital D, without a doubt. A few times, when we've gone to J & J's house in the late afternoon, I had forgotten the flashlight because the sun was still out when we left the house. Now I keep a little purse-sized flashlight in my bag.... it's like the American Express card: Don't leave home without it.

Trouble is, even with the flashlight, you don't know exactly where to point the light. Do you shine the beam at the ground first, to make sure a snake isn't in the same spot your foot is going to be? Or do you aim the light at eye-level, to make sure a spider's web isn't going to wrap itself around your face like sticky shards of Saran-wrap?

I couldn't decide which was more horrible.... stepping near (or on) a snake, or walking into a web, so my flashlight beam began at the ground and worked its way up near the trees. It was slow walking, from J's front door to our car, and my husband was way ahead of me. He never even notices all the creeping crawling things in these woods, just because he's never looking for them. Maybe that's the secret? If you don't look for them, you won't find them? Somehow, they always seem to find me.

The six of us played a card game called "Shanghai" last night. You need one deck for every two players, which makes for an awfully thick wad of cards to shuffle for six players. With each round of cards, you have to come up with certain matches, like three of a kind, five of a kind, a set of four, a run of six..... the 2's and the Jokers are wild cards, so that makes it a little easier, but still, it's hard to remember from one hand to the next what you're trying to get out of the mountain of cards in the middle of the table. During the game, we were busy with guacamole and chips, fresh cherries and homemade brownies, so all of those distractions kept us looking at the printed sheet of instructions every three minutes. J said that the game would be more interesting if we were drinking glasses of wine instead of bottled water.

Glasses of wine. I don't drink wine anymore. Sometimes a sip or two, if any at all. But it does make me wonder......... how many sips of wine would it take for me to walk in the dark of night (with or without a flashlight) and not worry about snakes on the ground and spider webs dangling from the trees?

As we made our way home last night, my husband and I in our car, and J & J walking (walking!!) from J's property to their own, I didn't know whether to applaud their bravery or tsk, tsk at their wanton disregard for all things creeping, crawling, prowling and slithering through the fields. J & J did indeed have a flashlight, but I can tell you this: it would have taken an acre of airport runway lights for me to be walking from one part of these hills to another in the dark (Dark) of night.

And we haven't seen J & J at all today. For all we know, they're still out there in the pasture somewhere, either stuck in a massive spider web, or glued to a fresh cow-patty as big as a turkey platter.