Post AeyYiwyOrOPGRqmp9c by anne@toot.cat
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 (DIR) Post #AeyYiwyOrOPGRqmp9c by anne@toot.cat
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       It was one of those  midnights, where I tossed and turned. After a few hours I gave up, stomped down two flights of stairs to the basement, and threw myself on the big orange couch in front of the TV. The basement is an open space, half media and gaming, half craft and builder space, with shelves of supplies and my husband’s workbench in the corner. @dwenius is a fisherman, and he likes to build rods and tie flies.I was sitting there, grumpily surfing streaming services, when my dad stopped by for a visit.Two things you should know: one, my father has been dead since 1995 and two, I don’t believe in ghosts.Of course I will tell you I don’t believe in ghosts and then in the same breath say I grew up in a haunted house. There's simply no other way to describe it.It was a drafty old Victorian farmhouse, tucked under a shady ridge in rural Vermont. In addition to being generally chilly and damp throughout, there was one room that was always significantly colder than every other; didn’t matter the time of day, time of year. It was a spare bedroom and my mother used it as a sewing room and as an overnight guest room for visitors. Funny in retrospect, but honestly you could sleep there just fine at night. But if you tried to take a nap during the day? You’d wake out of a sound sleep—terrified, in a cold sweat, heart pounding—with no memory of what you’d been dreaming about.The attic was inexplicably noisy. From the hallway below, we would heard boards creaking overhead from the weight of footsteps, or storage boxes sliding across the floor. The attic door—which had both an upper and lower latch on it—always drifted open. Latch it tight before bed, and it would be cracked open an inch in the morning.At night, when my brothers and I were in our beds, a swirling cloud of multi-colored pinpoint lights would come flowing into each of our rooms in succession, float over the bed, then bunch up and swirl back out the door and on to the next room. We never felt frightened by this. It was as if the house were tucking us in at night and keeping us safe.So you can understand how, at 3:17 in the morning, it surprised me not at all to see a lemony aura hovering across the basement from me. Nor did I think it strange that I immediately knew it was my father.As quickly as I knew it was him, I was just as suddenly awash in grief. A grief I hadn’t felt in years, decades even. I said softly, “Hi, Dad.” Tears welled up and——Grief crying is different. Other kinds of tears, they trickle down your face. But grief? Grief FLOODS your eyes. Your nose runs. Your mouth fills with saliva. Your body sweats.As I wept, he floated in the corner of the craft space, by my husband’s workbench. Dad seemed to be turning, looking, saying, “What is this? Whose is this?” and I realized with a shock that he’d died before any of my current life had come to be. After my first marriage, before my second, before any of my kids were born. I had so much to tell him. Too much for words!Instead, in a long silent burst, my life of the past 24 years rose up and poured out of me with even greater force than my tears: images and sounds, births, deaths, jobs, houses, husbands… until at last I was empty, the river had run dry.At the end of all that, he only wanted to know one thing: was I okay?A question I hadn’t thought to ask myself for a long time. Maybe not since being hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk two years earlier. Not in all the long months of putting myself back together both physically and emotionally. Yet I found myself answering immediately without any thought at all. “Yeah Dad, I’m okay.“I’m really okay.”And for the first time in two years, I finally knew that I was.We stayed like that a while, me sitting on the couch, him existing in the space by the workbench. Then I saw him shift and rotate slightly again, and a memory from him washed over me, a return on the flood I’d unleashed:The two of us out fishing together in his boat on the lake at dusk. As the light faded we pulled in the down riggers, switched off the motor and sat back. We drifted and watched the Milky Way surge into brilliance overhead, listening to the gentle slap of water against the hull. I was in my late teens and struggling mightily with——with being a young adult, with the chasm between my desires in life on the one hand, and everything I didn’t know about the world and living in it on the other. I had said, “Dad, I just don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I should do!” And in reply he’d said the kindest possible thing to me, in the kindest possible way. “Oh babe, I don’t know what you should do, either.”And so I turned to this shimmering presence off to my right and said, “Dad, I still don’t know what to do, or what I want, or what I should be.”I felt him smile, laugh a little and say, “It’s okay. You don’t have to. I love you.”“I love you too, Dad.” We sat in peaceable silence for a while, all the tears and the memories settled, and then he slowly faded away.I don't believe in ghosts.#ghosts #haunted #halloween