“Miss City Dump”

     They were all in Oysterville last night – everyone who was anyone.  Miss Piggy, Miss Kitty, Matt Dillon, Julia Child and the couple from American Gothic!  There were hippies with roach clips and cowboys with six shooters.  There were vampires and Vikings, witches and black cats.  But the most unexpected party guest of all was Mrs. Crouch, the ghost who usually stays out of sight in our house.
     “Hello, I’m Mrs. Crouch,” the beautiful young woman said to me.  She was dressed all in black, from her elegant feathered chapeau to her high-necked Victorian gown, and she was holding her seven-month-old baby girl.  (We know that the real Mrs. Crouch was drowned, perhaps purposely, in 1892 and we know that her infant girl was saved.  Mrs. Crouch is in the Fern Hill Cemetery near Raymond, but we have no record of what became of her daughter.)
     “I’m so pleased to finally meet you, Mrs. Crouch, though I feel like I’ve known you for some time,” said I.  “May I call you Sarah?”
     “Oh, was that my name?” asked the young woman, breaking character for the moment.  And we began sharing information about the 21-year-old wife of Josiah Crouch, an early Oysterville ‘preacher’ who my great-grandmother later labeled a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”
     It turned out that last night’s Sarah Crouch is, in real life, the sister of our party’s host and she and her family live in Portland.  When she decided to attend the party as a character from Oysterville’s past, she searched the internet and learned about Mrs. Crouch.  As we talked, the penny dropped and she exclaimed, “Oh!  You’re the writer!  You’re Sydney Stevens!  It’s your blog and other stories I read online!”
     A sort of thrill, or perhaps a chill, passed over me at the thought of Mrs. Crouch out there in cyberspace making herself known to people far off from Oysterville.  That Mrs. Crouch certainly does get around!