We were driving to the house of a friend who was dying. The entire neighborhood had been farmland, long ago; who knew how much pesticide had leeched into the groundwater over the years. I watched the houses as we drove past, and remembered the people who had lived in them: the man who died of pancreatic cancer, the woman who had lung cancer, the woman who died of ovarian cancer, the man who died of brain cancer.
It was October, almost Halloween, and there were ghosts hanging from most of the trees.