Monthly Archives: September 2009

Conversations with Dead Husbands


Just to clarify, I get song signs from my late husband, Will, and that’s it. There’s never been anything more aside from a couple of dreams here and there where he has more or less been just an extra. He doesn’t speak to me or rattle windows or make the floorboards squeak. In the early months after his death, he – according to Dee – would stop by and play with her and there was that picture he showed his face in, but he saves visitations for Rob.

I’m not kidding. He visits Rob in dreams.

I woke Friday morning to find that Rob was up even earlier then usual and dressing in the shell of our not quite finished walk-in closet. Allergies are currently beating me about the sinuses and ear tubes due to the fall harvest ringing our little hamlet with a thick dusty residue making uninterrupted sleep impossible, so I lay in bed for a bit to get my bearings. The other night I’d heard my name being called from the corner of the room by the wall cupboard and for some reason I glanced over there this morning. I saw a bright glow behind the door that quickly skipped to the middle of the room and vanished on a run towards the blinds.

“Was it headlights maybe?” Rob asked when I told him.

No, headlights aren’t yellow or perfectly round and they leave streaks.

But I digress because I only mentioned the voice and the light to Rob after he told me about the dream that woke him up early.

“I was sitting at a lunch counter with Will,” he said. “He was on one side and I was on the other. There was a third person too that I didn’t know and seemed to be facilitating our conversation.”

I searched the first husband archives in my brain for a place that matched the description. Nothing matched. We didn’t have haunts like that though something makes me believe it was a place where Will used to play pool. Perhaps in one of the little hole in the wall southern Iowa towns in Warren county.

“I wasn’t sure it was him at first because he had longish hair and was leaning forward so the hair covered the sides of his face,” Rob continued.

Will started losing hair shortly after we were married. It vexed him horribly because male pattern baldness ran on both sides of his family and, in addition, he was sprouting hair on his chest for the first time.

“I’m going to be bald and have a hairy back,” he would complain. “Great.”

But when he was young, and unemployed, he had long hair and really wanted to find a job that would sanction long hair. He kept his hair short – sometimes shaved to the wood – for comfort in the stuffy warehouse were he worked and then later because of the fact that his hair was falling out, but he really was a Kurt Cobain wanna-be with his flannel shirts, dreams of long locks and a dark inner poet.

“We had a long conversation, and I don’t remember it all but two things stood out,” Rob told me. “He said he wanted to take a bike trip in Mesa Verde with you and that he thought I was doing a great job with Dee.”

Will talked a lot about the Boy Scout camp down in New Mexico. It was his favorite place after the mountains. We schemed for a while about making a move to Denver after we were married, and he always talked about wanting to make sure that at some point we took our children to visit his favorite places out West.

“And then there was a group hug at the end,” Rob finished.

The last time Will visited Rob in a dream, he hugged Rob. Hugging was something he picked up from my mother – who basically forced the whole huggy culture thing on our family when she went through her middle-life crisis and was a Charismatic for a while. The hugging stuck and the talking in tongues mercifully faded into family folklore.

I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit annoyed by the surreptitious way Will keeps tabs and inserts himself. However, I am glad for the mini-updates on him, knowing that he is getting on with his existence on whatever plane he is residing and is happy with the way things are going here.

a little bit of sugar


… attracts more flies than vinegar, or something like that. Now that things seem poised to tip down South – because if lynching a government census worker is just unrest as usual then there has been a serious lowering of the tolerance for dissent – I think it might be time for the media mongerer’s to couch their distaste, ridicule and hatred in something uptempo and with a beat that sets toes tapping.

A Calling #fridayflash


The sun dipped, torching the horizon a familiar red-orange haze. Colleen stood on the back porch and listened. She’d put on an old black sweater before stepping out even though the Indian summer continued without sign of abatement. It draped her as loosely as it had the wire hanger in the coat closet. She held out  an arm and observed a bony wrist  before stepping down into the yard and heading for the gate.

Up the alley and lightly across the road, Colleen was soon in the fallow field, overgrown in defiant contrast to the sheared barley fields that shouldered it. She slowed her gait and began a meandering zig-zag towards the pond. The sweater was too warm as the day’s heat wafted up, caressing her seductively, but she kept walking not stopping until she felt a sudden chill that warmed her heart even as it dried the sweat on her forehead and upper lip.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, Colleen squatted  and began clearing the ground cover with her bare hands. Clumps of dirt came up with each handful of grassy scrub which Colleen tossed with disinterest to either side. When she had cleared a patch roughly the size of a wall clock face, she worked to smooth the surface taking clumps and breaking them to powder with her fingers until a bare, but rough, surface stared up at her accusingly.

The air was colder now. She’d felt the temperature drop around her like a sheet of winter rain as she worked. Dropping out of the squat and coming to her knees, Colleen paused. She brought her hands together and rubbed them as if to warm them but they were colder than the air around her now. She shivered involuntarily, knowing that time was at a premium and not inclined to work to her advantage yet. Determined to have the last word, Colleen reached into the various pockets of the sweater draping her like a magician’s cloak and produced three plastic baggies which she tossed in a pattern to the ground just outside the circle she’d created, careful not to let them contact the edges.

She emptied the contents of the first baggie into her left hand and carefully spread it around the circle until the brown dirt shimmered and the sharp silica-like crystals drew blood. She applied the second baggie in a similar manner using her right hand with the same results and then clasped her bloody palms together, touching her forehead to her thumbs briefly before dumping the last bag’s contents in a pile dead center of the crackling circle. It ignited like a torch and Colleen braced herself as the flame licked at her face. Colder than the frigid air which knifed her lungs with each breath, the flames grew and expanded towards her as she stood, ready to be consumed or admitted.

She turned to face the road, realizing that the searing light was all around her or rather that she was the light because the flame emanated from her now. She lifted one arm and then the other. Delighting in the light that shimmered and dimmed depending on the bend of an elbow or the flick of a finger.

Careful not to step out of the circle, Colleen stilled her body and began to prepare for meditation. She had no idea how or when it would begin or how much time was needed for events to play out. She closed her eyes, wondering what she would see when the time came to open them again.