Scary snowman in Harvard Sq. terrifies the locals. Brilliant stuff.

[IrishAyes]

30. I'm blessed with a number of Buddhist friends, not local of course, but from my life on

both coasts. It's generally thought that I am an old soul. One thing I love about this hundred-year-old house I bought in what was an early settlement along the Lewis-Clark Trail, is that it's built around an 1848 log cabin. People think I'm silly (for many other reasons too) when I tell them I can feel past spirits in old homes. And that I tend to find it comforting.

One time in California in an area settled even earlier, a farmer's wife invited me over to keep her company when the rest of her family took a trip she preferred to skip. I walked in the front door for the first time, looked around, and said, "I thought you said you were alone. That all your family had gone." She said, "Well, they all left this morning." I replied that the minute I crossed the threshold I could feel quite a few people around. She almost broke down in tears of relief, telling me that she never heard better news in her life. Seems her ancestors had owned that farm since the early Spanish settler days, and she kept telling her family that some of them were still hanging around. They kept telling her she was crazy.

I said, "No, you're not crazy. They're deaf."