When I was a kid, I found solace from a house that was pretty stressful, where my dad was sick and my mom really didn't know how to handle it by taking a backpack and going on walks up the mountain behind our house.
And I did that every single day.
My job was, as a kid to experience whatever mystery and magic and maybe, you know, fairy realm just happened to be hovering right under the surface.
There was a cave on the hill behind my house.
There was this huge rumor that it had been the cave that had been used by counterfeiters during the twenties and that they had produced all this counterfeit money.
And then the feds had figured out that they were there and gone and found them and rooted them out and dynamited the cave, but that the printing press was still locked inside the cave.
And so a huge part of my childhood was spent in some combination of sitting on rocks and playing flutes and pretending that I was about to meet a hobbit and also searching into these dark spaces all over that hill for evidence of the way that people had used the landscape, that investigatory, mysterious.
Maybe there's some hidden story here, and maybe it's dark.
Maybe it's going to pull me into closer connection with some tragedy that happened here.
That instinct is as old as anything in my bones.
It is the first instinct that I have.
You are listening to love and radio.
I'm Nick Vanderkolk.
Today's very special Halloween episode, the story of the Box.
This audio adventure features Erin Cathall, who shares her encounter with the most innocent box, found not directly on the ground, but on the grounds and inside the belly of a tree of Edna St.
Vincent Millay's love lovely upstate New York wood.
That's it.
Nothing at all to be frightened of.
Now please listen.
With headphones on.