Ms. Hazel

My family was all together over the weekend. We had a great little time! And we had company, of course! And we ate SO MUCH!

I don’t plan on eating until Thanksgiving now.

Ha.

That's a lie.

Anyway, one night our mom was reading something to us and it sparked one of those “Do-you-remember-when-” sessions.

One memory in particular got all of us talking.
Let’s just call this memory “Ms. Hazel.”

When I was a kid my dad always wanted me and my brothers to have experiences that maybe other kids wouldn’t have. He was a big proponent of meeting all kinds of interesting people. “No one is a stranger to our dad,” we kids would say.

I remember one person in particular that caught my whole family a little off guard. She was a neighbor from a few miles away. Now remember, we grew up in a super rural area, so neighbors from 6 miles away were really only like 8 houses down the road.

Anyway. She was a neighbor and I don’t have the foggiest idea how my dad met her or invited her over. What I do remember is this woman, probably in her upper 70’s, walking into my house. Brown skirt on with a cardigan, white hair in a coiffed bun, long neutral colored coat.

She had come for dinner.

And she was…..weird.
I know, it’s not very nice to say, but she was. We had had some pretty interesting characters in our house, but none were like her.

She was always talking about how she had worked for the government and had spent time in Russian and Africa and everywhere else and government cars would just show up at her door in the middle of the night (yes, at the farm down the road) and take her to Washington D.C. and she said she had seen all of these documents; that she still had all of these documents. She told us that microwaves were going to kill all of us, that certain politicians were going to turn out to be bad, and she referred to herself in third person.

“Ms. Hazel went here and she did this.” “No, Ms. Hazel doesn’t like that, thank you.” Etc. Etc.
That was dinner. And we all kind of stared at each other after she left and were like, “What in the world was Ms. Hazel?” We were confounded to say the least.

Over the course of the next few months I think my parents tried to reach out to her a few times again, for even though she lived down the road, she didn’t have electricity, she didn’t have running water, her house looked almost like it was abandoned, she didn’t have a car. She always wanted my dad to drink a bottle of wine with her. She would wear a stocking cap with long coats in the summer, collecting sticks in her yard for her wood burning stove.

It was rumored that she had a reindeer in her barn.
How odd.
After a while I think my dad gave up. I think he thought she was a nut-job.
So time went on and Ms. Hazel faded from our memories.

A handful of years later we heard that she had passed away.

And then the plot thickened. It must have been the farmer who owned the property she lived on or her family or somebody was going through the house to see if anything was salvageable.

And do you know what he found?

Artifacts from Russia and Africa and Everywhere Else.
Documents. Legal documents. All of the ones she had told us about.
She had passports and travel tickets. Trench Coats.

Do you want to know the nuttiest thing?
Everything Ms. Hazel had told us was true.
She actually HAD been a spy, just like she told us. Cars had picked her up in the middle of the night.

To make the story even less believable, a few years ago my parents were hours away from our house in an Asian restaurant and they started talking to the people at the table next to them. When my parents said where they lived the guy goes, “Oh yeah, I had an aunt who lived up there. Did you ever know a Ms. Hazel?”

Shocked my parents were, but glad that they could say yes.
“We heard she was a spy, huh?”
The nephew replied, “Oh yeah, she totally was. She would bring us back trinkets as a kid from all over the world. She would be gone a lot and then just randomly show up. We never really knew where she was....”

A spy, living down the road from me. If only I had known that then. What in the world must it be like to be a spy?!!? To be a spy, don’t you have to believe that there must be a whole lot of stuff going on under the surface? All kinds of hidden things. Plot and plans. That no normal people want to think about, talk about, or confront.

Except those that do. And believing that leaves you really no option other than to do something about all of those hidden things.

No wonder she was weird. In her case, truth really is stranger than fiction.

Ok, that’s what I have for you right now. Trust me, I’m going somewhere with this.

And I will. Later.

Happy Tuesday.