diagon alley

The image of the County Fair auction was too much to pick up and carry around inside me.

I scurried across the edges of "downtown" Hillsdale, clutching my kitcat bar defensively.

A storm was coming. A lot of horsey people with puffy faces and slopey brows who speak a strange and incomprehensible dialect of English started to go away. The gray clouds bared their fangs.

The lower East side of town swayed in the wind. Birds fluttered in dry leaves.

Leaning against a wedge of abandoned storefronts, I listened to the soothing flap flap flap of a screen door.

The sign on the door said

"HILLSDALE GREEN PARTY".

Curiouser and curiouser. I yanked on the door. There was a blinding noise. So I closed my eyes and covered my ears. The noise went and went and went.

Then I recognized the noise and opened my eyes in pure astonishment.

There was a cheerful wooden sign that read "the annex". The smell of coffee and WiFi satured the athmosphere. Sofas and end tables were wreathed in holiday lights.

I saw a board on the back wall painted with 1 giant pastel dot.

"I see", I said politely.

"Welcolme to the annex", said a man with a head of blonde ringlets, "Hillsdale's only organic coffeehouse, bookstore and yoga center".

The mutal silence was filled with track 4 from Vince Guiraldi's Grace Cathedral concert.

"The Green Party sign is part of a screening process", he said crisply. "This is still a....covert operation"..

The industrial strenght coffee grinder whirred. This is a story about how people carry an erector set model of their neighborhood around with them, and set it up wherever they can.