It’s funny about a trip to town especially one that goes on for a week or more.  Your sense of being changes.  Everything feels different.  Little ‘city’ tentacles reach out and touch you, little feelers, sticky cobwebs.  It is like the ‘urban thing’ is an entity and it wants you back.

This weird feeling of inanimate seduction comes naturally enough by just driving familiar streets and encountering friends and acquaintances.  We part after our brief visit with ‘See you at Xmas!’ or ‘Why don’t you come up?’.  And – there you have it – you are back in the loop.  Not a tentacle so much as a ‘sticky’ of some sort.  Something that re-invests you back in the ‘old world’.

Sometimes it is more direct:  “Oh, we have one of those.  We’ll send it to you.” Or “Can I send you my lease renewal for a quick review?”  Our recent re-emergence reminds people of our existence and we come back into their consciousness.  And then we, in effect, re-entangle with them and the larger grid through that friendship or some small business.  And that is OK.  More than OK, actually.  But, sometimes it is just weird.

When Sal and I got back, she was contacted by a small firm that values her editing services on a piecemeal, ad hoc basis maybe once or twice a year.  We hadn’t visited them, hadn’t contacted them.  But their consciousness was  somehow ‘rekindled’ and they made contact.  Probably just a coincidence.  But it happened to me, too.  An old client is now back in touch.

Sal met an old neighbour while shopping.  Another distant old friend left a message. We dropped in to see someone and they put us in touch with………well, you get the idea.

I know.  It is no real mystery.  Just people connecting.  But it does seem weird sometimes; people with whom you have not heard a peep in three years, all of a sudden in contact.  Out of the blue.  And that kind of thing always seems to follow a visit.  It is like we leave a trail of spores or something and these old contacts sniff them in the air.  Hard to explain.

Well, I did leave my raincoat somewhere last time and so that works as a reminder to someone, too.  But, trust me.  I am not talking about leaving my clothes all over town and then wondering why people get back in touch.  This is more subtle.

And, in an equally strange way, the country kind of rebuffs you as well, like you have stood them up or been late to the party.  Two neighbours went to the hospital.  A baby was born.  A wedding took place.  The ravens got into the freezer.  The water system developed a hiccup.  A bottle leaked in the cupboard.  When we left, we hadn’t had the fire on but, one week later, it was obvious that we needed it now.  Just subtle, weird little natural reminders that ‘you were gone too long!’

“Dave!  You’re going nutty on us!”

“Yeah.  I guess.  This stuff isn’t magic.  There is no giant consciousness knowing and caring about our whereabouts.  It is just coincidence or my  overactive imagination.  The weather has changed because the season has changed.  The summer people just left because, well, the summer is over, not because we had just left.  But everything just feels different and…….well…………I am 99% sure it is just a coincidence.  Probably”.