Police helicopters make your day more surreal

At about 8:30, this morning, I heard the helicopter go over the house. This isn't that unusual, sometimes Lifeflight lands at the school if there's been an accident, and since we can practically spit from our house to the school...but then it didn't land and it just kept circling. And circling and circling. On our walk to school, I see that there are cops in cruisers everywhere, too. This can only be some kind of missing person hunt, I thought to myself. Immediately, one assumes that somebody has murdered somebody and is on the lam in our little town. Similar things have come to pass in Franklin County, though not with any regularity, and it's been a lot quieter since the 80's, even. Picture, though, our sleepy town in its narrow river valley, surrounded by hills, and into this idyllic New England scene we add a police copter. Hello, I live in a fishbowl, little did I know.

I went home, put some music on, and stuck my nose in a book until it went away. It seemed the only sensible thing to do.

By this time, though, I also had made inquiries and discerned that it was, indeed, a missing person hunt--actually, an older woman from a nursing home, gone missing overnight without her coat. She turned up around 10 a.m. a few miles out of town, and is in the hospital in good condition, according to the radio.

Still, it gave the spring-like day a peculiar flavor.