A Peek At Karen's World

Wednesday, I had the wonderful opportunity provided by the Peony Project to meet some of my Christian blogger friends via Google Hangout. I met Bonnie from Strong and Sweet. I also got to talk with Faith from Life With Mrs. G and the Artist and Rachel from The Random Writings of Rachel. It was really fun to get to know them on a personal level and match their voices. Since we are all Christians, one thing we talked about was how, in a sense, we use the blog for Heavenly Father and Christ. A lot of the girls I've met in the Peony Project share their favorite scriptures, or experiences of when Heavenly Father has led them, or what they are grateful for. As a Mormon, we are encouraged by church leaders to share the Gospel through our blog. If you are interested in learning more about the Mormons, click here. What was really cool is that we ended with a prayer! I loved that little detail.

Today, I want to introduce you to a fun girl I've gotten to know in the past month. She also happens to be my Big for the Bigs and Little Exchange. Karen, from A Peek At Karen's World is gonna take over from here!

Hi, all! I'm Karen from A Peek at Karen's World, and I'm so excited to share this guest post with you today, just in time for Halloween....

Several years ago, I served an LDS mission in Montreal, Québec, Canada. After six months in my first area, I was transferred to a new city just three days before Christmas. And I wasn't just sent to a new area where I didn't know anyone. I was sent to Mascouche, Québec. While it is only 20-ish kilometers from Montreal, the house we lived in felt like it was hours from civilization. It was January. If you've never been to Québec in January, let me just tell you. It's cold. And there is snow. A lot of snow. So much snow. One night, my mission companion, Sister Angel, and I had no appointments and just an hour or so until curfew. It was dark because, in January, Québec turns the lights out at 3pm. This particular evening, it was sometime around 7:30, but it felt more like midnight. With no objective, we decided to go knock on doors in a little neighborhood near our house. (For those of you that are not LDS, I should point out here that missionaries are perfectly aware that going door-to-door, which we call 'tracting', is almost completely unproductive. When those cute missionaries show up at your door, chat with them a bit. They're not trying to annoy you. They're really just bored.) Sister Angel picked a street from our map, the last street in this small subdivision ten minutes from town. There were no sidewalks between our house and the neighborhood, so we decided to drive, even though it was only about a half mile down the road. I was driving, and I slowly steered the car down the chosen street, carefully avoiding the deep muddy slush that stood in the middle. Trekking through the sludge was going to be tricky, but we kept telling ourselves that we would be blessed for our efforts under such unpleasant conditions. There were houses on both sides of the road, their porch lights glowing just enough to make up for the lack of street lamps, but not quite doing enough to illuminate the dark shadows cast by the trees and shrubbery. The street dead-ended without even having the courtesy of being a cul-de-sac. One solitary house stood on the left. To the right, a tall row of trees blocked the view of the snowmobile trails just a few hundred yards away. When I pulled up to the edge of the trees, I noticed the only sound came from the distant whine of snowmobiles. There were no cars, no people, no dogs barking. It was nearly silent, dark and cold. We just had to do this for an hour and we could go home for the night. The plan was to start at the lonely house on the end, go down one side and back up the other. On a cold night like that, it shouldn't take long since people were always so reluctant to answer the doorbell. I opened my car door and grumbled, not for the first time, about how irritating it was that the dome light on our Chevy Cavalier didn't turn on when the front doors opened. Already in my heavy coat, three layers of wool socks, and sturdy shoes, I shut the door and waited for Sister Angel to retrieve her boots and mittens from the back seat. She opened the rear door, flooding the car and a few feet around it with pale light, shoved her feet into her Sorels and shut the door, walking around to join me on the other side. She adjusted her fingers into her mittens and I watched as the dome light faded off and immediately brightened again. I can't fully explain what happened next, but I KNEW we needed to get back into the car and leave. I ordered Sister Angel back into her seat as I threw the keys into the lock and turned. We were back inside and within seconds I had the Cavalier turned around and headed back down the road, on our way home. I felt a pit in my stomach that really can't be explained. I knew something was very wrong and almost didn't notice the person walking down the street. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, but I assumed it was a man. He seemed to be wearing little more than jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, definitely not dressed for temperatures like this. I couldn't help looking at him as we passed, which felt like slow motion. The person didn't look at me, although as we passed I didn't see a face. There was just black where the hood opened and I felt like I was going to be sick. I kept driving, hitting potholes and thick puddles of icy water, paying less attention to where I was going than I had when we arrived. As soon as we had passed the faceless stranger, I looked in my rearview mirror and he was GONE. He had disappeared and so had his footprints. That was the last time Sister Angel and I went tracting at night. But it was not the last time we would be frightened by mysterious footprints in the snow. But you can read about that story on my blog.