Damn.

Three weeks ago, I was having some serious anxiety about going to the home of someone I'd never met, sleeping under their roof, and working for them for four long weeks. This was aside from my usual nervousness about meeting new people, too. I'd had multiple very kind email exchanges with the woman who'd posted the advertisement on the web page -- she'd been incredibly willing to have me, and even more willing to pick me up.

This Internet kindness threw me. All the other hosts I'd encountered were people with short, clipped, late, grammatically incorrect responses to my querulous queries; I'd been left with no doubt that these people had better things to do, vegetable patches to weed, organic feed to produce. This woman was not only kind and funny, she responded swiftly and knew how to use punctuation. Unnerved by this, I'd searched the WWOOFing web site and found that WWOOF hosts submitted to no tests, no inspections. There was no requirement for stopping anyone registering as one apart from their ability to pay the Web site fifteen dollars. In short, there was nothing to keep The Old Pub from being the wooded home of axe murderers.

Vaughan, the principal of the school I was helping teach English as a Second Language at, really wasn't helping. He kept stopping me in the hallway and looking worried; regularly he placed a hand on my shoulder in a fatherly way. "If you get there, and it's odd, and you want to come back to us," he would say, his kindly crinkly six-foot form staring at me from underneath his toupee-like hair, "just call. If anything's wrong..." he paused, "anything, anything at all..." and his eyes would grow distant.

On the web site's forum, I posted: "Hey, the lady I've been talking to seems really, really nice. She has a bunch of animals -- baby chicks, ducks, maybe even a hedgehog -- and a passel of children. They seem funny and kind.... they're almost too good to be true. How do I know I'm not going to the home of people who will murder me?"

Swiftly, a WWOOFing board member responded. WWOOF was working on it, but no, as of yet, there was no way to make sure that the Collinses were not serial killers murdering young hippies systematically. Still, he could plainly deduce from my description of the place that it was the Old Pub I would be staying at, and they seemed like pretty nice hosts. If it didn't work out, the board member told me, he could certainly find me another placement, in fact he was even a farmer himself. He ended by telling me to 'Trust people! They're inviting you into their home, too! You might be an axe murderer yourself!'

Chastened, I deleted my post, resolved to just suck it up and either get slain or not, and assumed that was the end of it.

Until yesterday, when driving with Chelsea, the kind, funny, grammatically correct host who is pretty much the same as her Internet persona, in her minivan the other day, I happened to mention it. "You know, I was so worried about this... I even posted on the web site..."

She started to laugh. "I... I know."

Oh god. "What?"

"My friend saw it on the forum. I don't usually monitor them, but she saw the thing about the hedgehogs and called me right away." She was enjoying my clear discomfort, chuckling slightly as she drove with her injured wrists placed delicately about the steering wheel. We were on the deserted, winding road that leads to their wooded home, with a car full of groceries.

"I'm so sorry! I deleted it -- I had no idea that people would know it was you so easily..." I was giggling nervously, counting the miles until we were home.

"Yeah, Mel and I were debating what to do. My friend said she'd write me a character reference, but for a while I was pretty set on picking you up from the bus station, acting all normal, then, calmly, right about here..." (I stared out at the gray, foreboding woods) "pulling the minivan over, opening the back hatch, hauling out a black garbage bag, a bunch of chains, and a pair of rubber gloves."

Although I'm sure the possibility was tempting, I'm really glad she didn't. Either I would have started just speed-dialing Vaughan straightaway, or I would have probably killed her in self-defense.