On Encountering a Witch's Hat

I found a witch's hat at my feet the other day while hiking along a stretch of road. I've encountered articles of clothing this way before. Shoes, quite often. Gloves too. This was the first witch's hat.

This seemed worth mulling over, so I stopped and thought about it. My first explanation was pretty prosaic—some kid was on the way to a party and waved the hat out the window and let it go.

But that seemed a little weak. Halloween was nine months ago. So my immediate second thought was that this was a real witch's hat—a hat, in other words, that belonged to a real witch.

The more I thought about it, the more inescapably plausible it seemed. Sure, it was made of that cheap shiny plastic typical of kids' costumes. But think about it—if you were a witch, you could shop for your clothes at those Halloween stores after Halloween, when everything is marked down to half price. What do you care? You dress like a witch all year long.

So that was one reason. Another is that witch's hats would naturally tend to blow off in flight. When my friends and I ride on boats while we're fishing, we have to be careful of our hats—we've circled around to pick them out of the water plenty of times. So that would happen with witches too and it's one more reason for them to shop at the Halloween stores, come to think of it.

But the real clincher, the thing that made me look up with a faint unease at the cheerful blue sky, was my sudden realization that the moon had been full the night before. The full moon has to be the witches' rush hour. In my mind I saw a black sky and a huge yellow moon, crisscrossed by broom-riding witches going about their witchy business.

I looked down again at the crumpled black hat. Maybe a kid dropped it. But maybe not. I let it lie there, stepped around it, and kept going. I didn't want to touch it, to tell you the truth. And I didn't want to be around if its owner dropped by, looking for it. Leave witch stuff alone—that's just simple common sense.