Thrifting.

I beheld a most macabre thing while driving down Fairmount last week.

A most macabre thing, indeed.

It was a wooden guillotine. Small, but not so small as to be rendered un-threatening. In fact, I was getting little shivers looking at it. What was it doing there, abandoned in a parking lot outside Shoppers Drug Mart? As I drove away into the dusk, my mind began forming origin theories, newspaper headline style:

High School Student Channels Spirit of Paris Geller, Puts Unheard-of Amounts of Time into Constructing Near Life-size Guillotine for French Revolution Presentation, Abandons Project near Dumpster Following Soul-Crushing Grade of B Minus

Oompa Loompas Conducting Public Executions Following Infamous Halloween Chocolate Snatchings of 2015

A Really Weird Carpenter Lives in This Neighbourhood

Regardless of where it had come from, I decided that it would be mine. I enjoy all kinds of thrifting, but the best kind of thrifting is accidental drive-by thrifting! Plus Bobby always loves it when I bring home things that we have no use for (yet… mwahahaha). There was a teeny moral dilemma in that the structure had been left in close proximity to the Catholic Charities bin, meaning it was probably intended for donation and and even though thunderstorm season is over in Calgary, I was a little wary of being struck by lightning.

I decided to give it a week and see if it was still there (okay, I forgot about it, but I got really excited when I accidentally drove past it again a week later).

Indeed, Gentle Reader, there yet stood the wooden death machine, looking appropriately weathered and menacing, waiting placidly as if for me. I greeted it as I approached.

“Hello, old friend. How about a trip to my front lawn for Halloween? You’re going to look so… special.”

Luckily, no pedestrians were witness to this monologue because they would probably have turned around with their children and started fleeing in the opposite direction.

I walked around to the front to get a better angle so I could take a picture and post it all smug-like on Facebook, complete with a moody Hipstamatic wash.

That’s when I saw that monstrous machination for what it really was…

The horror! The horror!

I was gobsmacked. By that, I mean I literally had an involuntary hand-to-mouth physiological reaction to my surprise. Then I started giggling nervously like a deranged Edgar Allan Poe character.

After I finished giggling, I went into a sort of daze, still hazy from the shock of having nearly loaded a municipal parking sign into the back of my vehicle. I stared at it a while longer and then, sensing that I would be wanting a physical record of this event for later, reached my arms up slowly and snapped a picture. Then I looked down at Beatrice, who was basically doing the 18-month-old version of this:

Just give me my arrowroot cookie and let’s get out of here before my friends see me

What, you may ask, is the point of all this? I really have no idea except, well, it’s a guillotine, and it’s Halloween, and I couldn’t not write about a guillotine on Halloween.*

Seriously though, I found a lot of great stuff at the thrift store over the past few months while I was neglecting this blog, and I will be sharing them with you in subsequent posts. Surprisingly, I only mistook the essential identity of a few of them before taking them home. Until then, Gentle Reader.

Until then.

*This paragraph is starting to read like a bad Dr. Seuss book.