TRAIL MIX part 2: Wagon Train

            In her book, Little House on the Prairie, my homegirl Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions that the Big Woods were growing so crowded that they more often than not would hear the echo of an ax that was not Pa’s ax, or a shot of a gun that was not Pa’s gun.  I completely sympathize with this sentiment.  In our world, Joseph and I can’t completely cut ourselves off from neighbors.  But there is a very real idea of being crowded, even on the five acres we currently rent. 

            Take for instance, the other day when I took my dogs into the deep back yard where I allow them to take care of their business, I saw a woman walking through the property.  I know this woman.  She drove her bus-turned-home (complete with wood and trash burning stove) onto the property of my neighbors a year or two ago. I saw her on our property before, and she thought I didn’t see her, so she slinked behind the building she was standing by to hide.  I decided this was as good of a time as any to introduce myself.  Joseph and I keep to ourselves, but even if we were the most open books on the planet (a goal my blog is going above and beyond in trying to reach) we would still appreciate anyone who wanted to come on our property to slink around to at least introduce themselves and maybe even ASK if it was okay.  As it turns out, she was making audio recordings of our windmill.  She collects sounds, apparently.  You can always tell a city slicker from their blatant disregard of boundaries.  If, in Idaho, I was caught trespassing, I would expect to at least be the target for some trigger-happy land owner.  You don’t cross boundaries uninvited. 

            So I call this woman on being on my property.  Again.  At first she tries to tell me the path through our property is easier for her to take to get to the back road.  So?  Then she tells me that the property line is actually marked by an old metal fence post, which Joseph and I had moved to its current location and has nothing to do with property lines whatsoever.  Then as I’m looking at her Bus-turned-Home, I realize that she has parked it in the very corner of the property line and has carved out a little yard from our side of the line for herself.  I was really beginning to get worked up when I realized something: I’m moving.  This is not my fight, nor my affair.  And this is a very good check mark in the column for pro-renting over owning your house. 

            Joseph and I are moving.  Thanks to a very kind lady, we found a house that is not too far from my work.  We’ve been moving boxes and furniture, but by bit, from our old country house to a home in the city.  Yep, we’re becoming city slickers, again.  The difference, however, is that there are actual fences to mark the boundaries between property lines.  And we won’t need a boat to go home.  The island was great while it lasted, but we out-grew it. 

            So pulling our lives with us in the back of the truck has set me to thinking a lot about Ma and Laura Ingalls.  We have the luxury of taking our things bit by bit and making multiple trips.  But if my worldly possessions had to compete with food stores for a space on a rickety old wagon, I’m not sure how I would decide between what to keep and what to leave behind.  But the call west held more promise to most than those worldly possessions they kept.  It was a promise for a new life and a new opportunity.  I think the pioneering spirit is alive in every culture, but has really been fostered in America where the Europeans found a wide open space where they could just pick up and leave there troubles behind.  I can’t count how many times I day dream about just picking up, moving house, and “starting fresh.”  It is a myth, and a dream that isn’t usually questioned.  Americans grow up with the idea that the grass is greener if they just venture out and see for themselves. 

So, if I over look all the inconveniences, the hard work, the doing without boxes of supplies and home furnishings, I guess I’m living the dream.  I will live in a new house and this new chapter of my life should be more than worth the effort. 

Ghost Stories

The house we currently live in is old.  Rumor has it that the original builders, the Nelsons, had to bring the lumber in by mule cart because our street didn’t exist in 1914.  When we moved in we thought it had a sort of crumbling charm.  Some of the exterior walls were bowed in the centers.  The old wooden stairs twisted around to a rather roomy space that was a little larger than a hallway, a space that connects the upstairs bedrooms and half-bathroom.  The lumber they are made from is well worn and shows wood grains close together which mean it is old wood.  New, commercially grown wood has wide spaces in the wood grains. 

            I woke up at 5:00 PM because I’m on the night shift.  The first thing I did tonight was step on a yellow jacket and it stung me right under one of my toes.  The long story short is that I had to stay home tonight and that enabled me to notice something with Joseph that unsettled both of us.  Because I’m on the night shift, I have to stay up all night anyway to keep my sleep cycle intact, so I was upstairs standing on the stairs in my accustomed place talking to Joseph as he readied for bed.  I always stand on the stairs while he flits from bathroom to bedroom getting ready.  As he was talking to me from the bedroom door we both looked up and saw something at the same time.  There are six white lines carved into the ceiling.  Six marks show that something was dragged from one point from in between the bedroom and bathroom doors to the stair landing.  It was Joseph who suggested that it looked like the mark of something with six fingers dragging its fingertips along the ceiling. 

            Now, I know what you’re going to say.  We probably moved something that scraped the ceiling and made the marks and didn’t realize it.  But Joseph and I are careful minded when we rent a place, and if either of us had made the marks, we would have remembered doing so.  What is more, when we tried to reproduce the marks with our own fingers, we found that we could not do it; the marks are cleaned off places on the normal aged discoloration of the white paint.  And in all this time living here, with me standing in that very spot talking to Joseph about his day as he came home from work, or plans while he was getting ready to sleep, neither one of us ever noticed these marks before.  They are both new to us.

            Normal people might think, so what?  Why are you so worried about these marks?  Well, I’m worried about them because they are just another unexplained phenomenon in a house full of unexplained events. 

            Right when we first moved into this house, we established that the dogs would sleep in the laundry room.  So one night in that first month or so after we made ourselves at home, I was tucking in the dogs, Dinky and Sally when I heard Joseph say, “Dinky, get down” from upstairs.  I hollered up to him to tell him that both Dinky and Sally were downstairs with me, and he said, “Oh, we have a black dog ghost.” 

            I rolled my eyes.  I’m usually much more prone to believe in ghosts than Joseph, so I knew he was teasing me.  He mentioned it again a few weeks or months later, seeing a dog that shouldn’t be upstairs, but as Sally is prone to sneak up there to make sure you’re not doing anything fun, I wrote the complaints off. 

            Then, one night, as I was upstairs in the office typing up some homework in the dark, I turned off the computer.  The only light besides the monitor upstairs was the light from the half-bathroom shining across the hallway and into our bedroom.  My eyes were a little wonky, because I had just been staring at a bright computer screen and now I was plunged in darkness, but I could clearly see that Sally was sitting in the doorway of our bedroom waiting to accompany me downstairs.  I stopped, and bent to pet Sally behind her ears and my eyes adjusted as my fingers came to the dog ears, there was nothing there.  No Sally.  No dog of any kind.  Sally was downstairs sleeping under Joseph’s recliner chair while Joseph watched TV.  The only thing I could do to explain the even to myself was to quote Joseph, “Oh, we have a black dog ghost.” 

            The dog ghost was fine.  Every once in a while it would dash across our peripheral vision, or seem to be in an otherwise empty room, but it has never appeared so real as to inspire me to touch it since that one time. 

            Joseph sleeps with a fan, and sometimes the fan causes problems in our marital bliss.  It can be too cold for me in the winter time.  It might cause earaches or my hair to tickle my face.  It might make gyrating noises if it’s an old fan and is on its last leg.  But rain or shine, summer or winter, Joseph has to have the fan to sleep.  Chalk it up to his being a Southern boy more used to fan-requiring climes.  So imagine my annoyance when the fan started making Joseph wake me up to tell me he heard voices. 

            “It’s just the fan,” I told him.  “I don’t hear anything.” 

            “No,” he insisted, “I hear voices.  Did you leave the TV on?” 

            Even with me telling him he was just dreaming or the fan was making his ears play tricks on him, Joseph went all the way downstairs to make sure the TV was off and then started looking for radios that might have turned themselves on in old junk drawers.  And this didn’t happen just one night, it happened at least once a month, and it became so common place that Joseph no longer looked for a cause and even stopped waking me up for it.  He would just mention it the next day. 

            “It’s the fan,” I told him each and every time. 

            So one night, about a year or so ago, I was lying on my side with Joseph asleep next to me when I heard two people talking.  I felt like I was hearing them from far away or that I was hearing a radio turned down very low.  But with the fan going, how could I hear it at all?  I actually got up and walked downstairs.  I couldn’t hear anything.  So I went to bed, but returning to the bedroom made the voices get louder.  The only radio we have in the bedroom is the alarm clock, and I listened with my ear to its speaker to try to rule out its going berserk.   Finally I had to lie down again and try to ignore it, but just as I started to drift off the voices would pick up again, or change tone, and wake me up until I woke Joseph up and asked him if he heard voices.  He didn’t hear them, but the next morning I had to apologize to him.  I guess the voices he heard were as real as they could be without coming from any identifiable source. 

            So we’re moving, and as if to prove that changes in the environment startle ghosts into action, our “friend” has been very present lately.  One morning while I was going to sleep for work, I felt someone walk into my bedroom even though I was home alone, the dogs were in the laundry room, and my BEDROOM DOOR WAS CLOSED.  The muffled sort of air that tells your ears that someone who is probably wearing a coat came through the closed door and walked across the fan (yes, Joseph turned me into a fan user).  As it walked across the fan, the wind from the fan was cut off, and as it passed, the wind hit my cheek again.  I kept my eyes squeezed shut as I felt it walk all the way around our bed and stop by me.  I refused to look at it and I forced myself to go to sleep.  It was real enough that it stopped the wind from my fan and I didn’t want to look at whatever it might be. 

            And maybe it’s just because I’m on the night shift that my comings and goings seem to overlap with its comings and goings more, but the other night I was trying to stay up so I could get ready for another stretch of work days, when I slowly began to nod off.  As my senses began to drift away I became aware that something was standing behind my couch just to my left and that as I was falling asleep.  I was falling asleep, so the part of my mind that became aware of the thing standing behind the couch could not rouse the rest of me, which seemed to be paralyzed with the prospect of going to sleep.  This thing (which I perceived as eyeless and hairy with black hair and large teeth) bent down to put its mouth next to my face and the smack of its lips against its gums woke me up faster than anything.  Nothing there.  Maybe it was just a dream, but I was fine not going to sleep for the rest of the night. 

            And maybe the face of black mold coming out of my wall is the face of Jesus coming to watch over us … and then again, maybe it’s just a face of a black mold man unaffiliated with any saviors coming to watch over us.  Maybe the mold man has six fingers it uses to drag across ceilings as he walks back to the place his wall over the stairs.  Who knows? 

            All I know is this: we are moving out of this house right when it is beginning to feel a little too crowded for comfort.