"Jean ever tell you of Direxa?"
The name jolted me. I summoned forth the pieces in a haphazard way. An old woman who traveled miles from Hay Bay into town to sell her produce sped across my mind. Consistent to the end, she sauntered through drudgery and routine until they claimed her sanity.
"Must be the climate in these parts," I found myself saying drily in the back of my throat. Meg was staring at me. I made an attempt to put my eyes off her.
I nodded my agreement indicating I had heard the name.
"Yes, Direxa. Of good Puritan stock, I added."
She spoke no agreement this time and told me to consult her if I had questions.
"Direxa, she's long dead!"
"I know, she still talks to me," Meg whispered turning to walk away.
In a typical fashion, I thought of the lore concerning the supernatural adolescent reading had brought me--the Superstition mountains of Arizona, dream time and the Darling range in Australia's north, the Snowmen, the Wendigo tales of the Coast Salish Indians. These, it seemed, were not more exotic than the home spun tales of my province's eastern townships, Lennox and Addington. Those two ghostly minutemen drilling in the marshes of the Ontario Coomb, Canada's answer to the Fens district of East Anglica. Strange, much as my presence here volunteering information to a woman who freely talked in lurid details concerning poor Humboldt's death but not of cars that visited these roads at night, clairvoyance, poltergeists or spells that bound her to a second home.