I drove past the trailhead of a favorite walking path last week, telling myself I ought to stop for a walk. Instead I kept driving, memories of ghostly trails in long ago Octobers on my mind. ’tis the memories that haunt us, not ghosts. But some places make you believe otherwise, and that trail was one such place. I remember walking the trail one day many years ago, feeling like I was being followed. Of course, there was nothing there but swirling leaves, and yet I’m still being followed by the memory.

I have no fear of supernatural beings, and I have never heard it said that so much harm had been done by the dead during 6,000 years as is wrought by the living in one single day.” — Alexander Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

I know people who believe in all sorts of things. Belief is a funny thing, or a tragic thing, depending on where those beliefs lead a person. It’s when someone demands that their beliefs must be our beliefs too that things get rather complicated.

That trailhead attracted me more for the fond memories of lunchtime walks early in my career, before life got busy and the world got insane. We all have moments in our lives that whisper to us, even something as simply as a trail through the woods on an autumn day. It was the trees that I remember, not as ghosts, but as a welcome respite from an office cubicle.

The lesson was then, and is now, to get outside and listen to what the universe has to tell us. Tomorrows memories are made today. Whether we make it a fairy tale or a ghost story, the choice is ours.