Little children yell, ‘Hey, hippie!’ at me in the San Francisco mornings like we yelled, ‘Hey, crazy woman!’ at you plodding through Tacoma twilights.

I guess you got used to it as I’ve gotten used to it.

As a child I would always hang my hat on a dare. Dare me to do anything and I’d do it. Ugh! some of the things that I did following, like a midget Don Quixote, trails and visions of dares.

We were sitting in the gutter doing nothing. Perhaps we were waiting for the witch or anything to happen that would free us from the gutter. We had been sitting there for almost an hour: child’s time.

‘I dare you to go up to the witch’s house and wave at me out of the window,’ my friend said, finally to get things going.

I looked up at the witch’s house across the street. There was one window in her attic facing down upon us like a still photograph from a horror movie.

‘OK,’ I said.

‘You’ve got guts,’ my friend said. I can’t remember his name now. The decades have filed it off my memory, leaving a small empty place where his name should be.

I got up from the gutter and walked across the street and around to the back of the house where the stairs were that led to her attic. They were grey wooden stairs like an old mother cat and went up three flights to her door.

There were some garbage cans at the bottom of the stairs. I wondered what garbage can was the witch’s. I lifted up one garbage can lid and looked inside to see if there was any witches’ garbage in the can.

There wasn’t.

The can was filled with just ordinary garbage. I lifted up the lid to the next garbage can but there wasn’t any witches’ garbage in that can either. I tried the third can but it was the same as the other two cans: no witches’ garbage.

There were three garbage cans and there were three apartments in the house, including the attic where she lived. One of the cans had to be her garbage but there wasn’t any difference between her garbage and the other people’s garbage. So …

I walked up the stairs to the attic. I walked very carefully as if I were petting an old grey mother cat nursing her kittens.

I finally arrived at the witch’s door. I didn’t know whether she was inside or not. She could have been home. I felt like knocking but that didn’t make any sense. If she were there, she’d just slam the door in my face or ask me what I wanted and I’d run screaming down the stairs, ‘Help! Help! She looked at me!’