this is my yellow wood

I hardly know where to begin. Usually, one would say, “begin at the beginning,” but I believe the curtain opened on this tale over two years ago. I doubt any of you want to sit through a story that goes on for that long, even if I did provide snacks and potty breaks.

So, I’ll begin at the end, which as we all know is just another beginning.

I quit my job.

Or maybe I was fired. The details are still a bit hazy at this point, but it doesn’t really matter. The bottom line is that I am voluntarily unemployed.

Mentally, I checked out at my job months ago. Day after day, I would sit at my desk and try to will myself to do what I was paid to be doing, but my brain refused to engage. My co-workers would be buzzing around me while I sat there motionless. For eight hours a day, I was an empty husk of a person warming a chair. Work piled up around me and I couldn’t even muster up the energy to care. I do feel bad about that. I know people are cursing my name right now as they clean up the mess I left behind. As much as that pains me to think about, I know that my leaving was the right decision.

I now know perfectly well what people mean when they say, “I hit a wall.” I didn’t just hit it, I ran full throttle into it and was knocked unconscious.
No, that’s not right.
I was knocked fully aware.

I may not know exactly what I am going to do, but I know exactly what I absolutely can not do any longer. That’s half the battle, isn’t it?

Currently, I am vacillating wildly between manic glee and heart-stopping terror. But at least I am feeling something. I was a zombie sitting at a desk for so long that any emotion is welcome at this point.

My plans?

Well, I’ll need to find some source of income seeing as how I was the sole bread-winner in my family (did I fail to mention that my husband is still in school and doesn’t have a job? yeah, that’s where some of the terror I’m feeling is coming from). First and foremost, though, I will write. I will finish my novel. I will see my dream finally actualized (that’s the manic glee part).

Wish me luck?

 

what dreams may come

What follows won a contest and was published in an anthology of real-life ghost stories last year. So you don’t have to buy the book, I thought I’d post it here. Since I wrote this for a contest, it lacks the “flava” that I normally bring to my stories, but it is 100% true. 

***

Groggy with sleep, I shuffled to the kitchen where my sister was already making herself breakfast. Our mother left the day before for a business trip, but I was in my mid-teens and my sister in her early twenties, so fending for ourselves was not a problem. I sat down at the counter and tried to clear the lasting images from a very vivid dream from my mind.

I was contemplating breakfast when my sister sat down next to me and said, “I had the weirdest dream last night.”

I turned to her, surprised. “Really? So did I.” Breakfast forgotten, I asked, “What was your dream about?”

She told me she dreamed she wore a dark green sweater. It was thick and warm and, although she had never seen it before, she instantly loved it. As she walked through our house, sections of the sweater began to glow. Looking down she saw sparks jump from the fabric. Frightened, she pulled the sweater off and threw it into the fireplace where it became engulfed in bright white flames. She shielded her face from the heat and when the fire burned out, the sweater was gone. The dream was unusual, but the striking realness of it all was what made it memorable.

“Your turn,” she said.

I told her that in my dream I was dressed as a 1920’s flapper. My short, green dress was covered in rows of silky fringe that swayed as I walked through my bedroom. Already late to the costume party, I stopped to check my hair in the dresser mirror and adjusted my sequined headband. Finally ready, I grabbed my green wool cloak from the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders. Just then, in the mirror, I caught a glimpse of a face superimposed over my own. It was gone in a moment, but that was all the time I needed to recognize my grandfather who died when my sister and I were very young. The sudden appearance of his gray, wrinkled face should have startled me, but instead I was comforted. I stood in front of the mirror hoping that he would show himself again.

It was common for my sister and I to have realistic dreams, so even though we noted the appearance of the color green in both of them, we did not feel there was any meaningful significance. However, when our mother arrived home later that day, the dreams were still fresh in our minds. We felt compelled to tell her about them.

As we described our dreams to our mother, she was silent, her eyes wide. After we finished, she said in almost a whisper, “Did I not ever tell you the story of your grandfather’s sweater?” Our confused looks told her that she had not.

When our grandfather was young, during the early 1920’s, he was basically a vagabond. He traveled the rails with only a satchel on his shoulder and the clothes on his back. His green wool sweater, more than just an article of clothing, was a beloved possession. One cold night, he stopped at a hobo camp to warm himself by a barrel fire. Chilled and weary, he did not realize just how close he stood to the flames. Sparks landed on his sweater and the fabric ignited. He yanked the burning garment from his body and threw it to the ground, stomping on it to extinguish the flames. The sweater, one of the few things of value he owned, was ruined.

“Your grandfather was trying to contact you, connect with you both in some way,” our mother said, eyes welling with tears.

My sister’s dream with the color green, the sweater and fire, and mine with the 1920’s era and grandfather’s face were just details, a skeleton. Our mother’s recollection, a story passed down, added flesh to the frame and made it come alive.

We all turned to look at the brass cube on the fireplace hearth that contained grandfather’s ashes. Many times over the years we had touched that cube and thought of him. On that night, he reached out and touched us back.

***

If you have a real-life ghost story, I would love to hear it!

Flying

I love going fast.  In a car, boat, plane, doesn’t matter.  I especially love roller-coasters.  The forward momentum plus the looping and diving are as close as I can come to feeling like I’m flying.  And even more than going fast, I love feeling like I’m flying.  I’ve dreamt that I can fly for as long as I can remember.  I fly in just about every dream I have.  Flying when I’m dreaming is as normal as walking when I’m awake.  So, its only natural that I would try to find an analog to that feeling while I am awake.  Roller coasters will do for now, but I’d really love to go hand gliding.  Either that or take ride in one of those things that look like a go-cart with a big fan on the back and a parachute overhead.  That looks super fun, too.  “What about sky diving?” you may ask.  Well, that does not look anything like flying to me.  That looks like plummeting through the sky at skin ripping speeds with an uncomfortably high chance that the trip will end in a bone liquefying collision with the Earth.  Nuh, uh.  Flying means that you have the option of traveling upward as well as downward during any point in your trip.  The only option in sky diving is down, rapidly.  And that, to me, misses the whole point of flying.  I want to exist in another elevation.  To travel along the curvature of the Earth at a height that I wasn’t designed to travel.  I don’t even have to be that high.  To cruise just above the tree-tops, maybe reaching down and letting my hand brush across the leaves, that would be heaven.  I’ve read somewhere that some birds seem to fly for no other reason than just because they can.  Well, of course they do!  Land-locked animals do the same.  Horses, dogs, sheep, children, sometimes they all run for no reason but to go fast.  It makes you feel alive, doing something only for the pure joy it brings.  That’s probably what my dreams have been trying to tell me all these years.  I need to pursue a life full of simple joy.  A life with the wind in my hair.