Time Well Spent as a Ghost

I recently moved back home after being away from upstate New York for a few years. Driving through town with the U-Haul in tow, there was this odd sensation of my adult self arriving to visit the younger me. Rolling past the High School. The ice cream place with the brightly colored picnic tables. A friend's house. Hidden places that still contained echoes of the innocent, over-confidence of that age.

As I dispelled the ghosts of the past, the idea struck me that there was no way my teenage self could have known about the changes that come with the steady passing of time. One thing I am not is a dreamer. I have always believed in facing the facts, even when it meant making decisions that took my life into directions I hadn't anticipated. Distant memories aside, the reality these days is that I'm up at dawn with a toddler while playing a temporary support role to my husband's career. A few years away from the job market means my degree and employment possibilities are fading fast in the rearview mirror. And all the while I'm despairing that the furniture we moved down here with barely fills up half the rooms in this old farmhouse. The truth is, I simply can't afford not to approach life from a practical point of view ...

... so I'm not sure what I saw that day. I can't even begin to explain it, but I also can't stop thinking about it. A challenge to my steadfast and determined grasp on reality. I was stacking dishes in the kitchen sink when I turned toward the pantry. Appearing out of nowhere was the outline of a young woman. Her shadowy figure was hazy and suspended in mid-air. She was dressed in a simple calico dress with an apron, holding a basket of brightly colored flowers. I stood motionless as my mind tried to process what I was seeing. 

I looked away for an instant and then she was gone.

***

My friend Tricia has the gift of always being able to find the humor in any situation. Monday, when she brought her daughter over to play with Cody I decided to run it past her.

"What? Standing in your laundry room?" she asked, simultaneously intrigued and cynical. Tricia and I had been in high school together and recently reconnected. She had married into a family of rather uptight republicans and was heavily pregnant with a little boy.

"Yup, right there in front of that window." I laughed and pointed toward the laundry room door and the as-yet uncurtained window that looked out onto the backyard. "She was standing about a foot off the ground, kind of hazy, wearing an old-fashioned type of dress. And she was holding a basket. Just holding a basket and looking at us."

"You and Cody?" Tricia looked at me, sipping her decaf.

"Yes. As a matter of fact, that's why I thought I wasn't just seeing things." I sat down, adding a teaspoon of sugar to my steaming tea and glaring across at her. "Cody looked right at her and pointed. I mean he could have been pointing at a bird out in the yard or something. The laundry room used to be the mudroom and pantry when this was an actual farmhouse. Anyway, I turned away for a minute and then she wasn't there. Gave me the chills."

"What did Myles have to say about it."

"You know him, he only half hears anything that isn't about the courses he's teaching or phone messages about his research. He shrugged it off and said what I needed to hear to ease my mind about being nuts." I laughed. "Anyway, that was like a month ago and nothing else odd has happened since. I washed the windows and polished the wood frame thinking it was a play of the light and shadows or something." Thinking to myself that I knew it wasn't.

"Well, you know as well as I do this house has changed ownership more often than most around here, but all I've ever heard were complaints about the roofing, the drafty fireplaces, and you guys installing a new boiler. Certainly nothing cool or interesting like unavenged murders or buried treasure." She lifted Katie up and placed a hat on her sparsely haired head. "Maybe she was a ghost showing up to warn Myles that his 'Beantown' beauty used to chase after anything that couldn't out run her."

"You're just wicked" We both laughed, thinking the same thing; that if anyone had told us when we were in high school that in twelve years we'd both still be here, they would've gotten clocked.