My brother sees dead people. Or, more accurately, he senses them.
In a classic case of sibling rivalry, that makes me jealous as sin.
I’ve always yearned for a little spookiness in my life, possibly because my childhood was one of Halloween deprivation.
That was my mother’s choice. The product of a loving, but farm-poor family of Dutch/Scot Irish descent, she’d do without before taking a handout.
Maybe that was a core reason for my grandfather’s deep disdain for Franklin Delano Roosevelt – the leader who created a stack of government programs to lift America out of the Great Depression. Too many giveaways?
At any rate, my mother didn’t want her six children parading up and down the streets of town “begging” for candy.
So, no costumes, no trick-or-treating for the likes of us. To make it worse, at least to my mind, she’d buy candy to hand out to the kids who came to our door. She didn’t mind if they begged.
My older sister swears my mother used pink- and green-striped flannel to create bunny costumes with pink satin stand-up ears for the kids (just four at the time) and my dad to wear to a church Halloween party.
But since I can’t remember the experience (although I do sort of recall the pajamas the costumes morphed into afterward), I can’t let my mom off the hook for spoiling Halloween for me.
Oh, well, she had lots of other wonderful qualities.
Although my next-door neighbor regularly saw the ghost of her grandmother – rocking in her chair in the living room like she always used to do – nothing spooky happened at my house.
I expected a different story when my husband and I moved into a two-story, Victorian-style home in Farmington right after we got married. The house rose in the middle of tall trees on a big tract that seemed a world of its own, although there was a Walmart across the street and an A&W nearby.
Gordon worked for low pay as the sports editor of the Farmington Evening Press, and we got to stay in the house almost rent-free as compensation.
The publisher’s great-aunt had lived there formerly, and it seemed to me like she was still there. One whole upstairs bedroom was devoted to stacks of millinery – fussy hats that had gone out of style decades before.
And the front foyer had bookshelves that contained handwritten county tax records I looked through to see if I could find common local surnames. I could.
The first floor had three large, wooden pocket doors to divide adjacent rooms from the parlor, and there was an old-fashioned enclosed staircase leading from the kitchen to the upper level.
The house certainly looked haunted but it never really delivered – except for one incident.
One morning I climbed the back stairs up to the only working bathroom, on the second floor. In the nearly pitch dark, I got the impression of a huge black spider right up in front of my face.
I knew it wasn’t real, but still reacted like anyone would – a little scream and a rush up to the top.
I let out a bigger scream when I opened the bathroom door and saw a big black spider – a real one – sitting on the bathroom rug.
The house had other oddities involving its electrical system – lights and power that turned on or off without our assistance – but we figured that was tied to the rats we knew lived within its walls.
We live in a three-year-old house now, rather than a 103-year-old one – no rats, no hats. A part of me is a little sorry.
Back to my brother. After my parents died within six weeks of each other a decade ago, my brother moved into their home along the Big River. My father never did well with neighbors, so the isolated house he built on several acres was the culmination of a modest dream.
When my brother said he sensed my parents’ presence, I looked at him a little askance. After all, they’d never visited me.
But something happened soon after he took up residence that backed him up.
My father had two sons, and by odd chance had two wedding rings to leave them. His original ring had gone missing, so he bought a replacement after a year or so.
Then, more years after that, the first ring turned up under the kitchen sink, invisible unless you happened to be replacing a pipe.
My brother liked to wear his inherited ring in remembrance and noticed sadly at the end of a spell of chores on the property that it had slipped off his finger, sometime, somewhere. It would be useless to look for it.
But he looked anyway. Almost immediately a breeze stirred up, pushing aside some leaves on the ground in front of him. There, on the patch of earth, was the missing ring.
“Dad wanted me to have that ring,” my brother declared.
Jealous or not, I had to agree.
Happy Halloween. Hopefully, your day has been filled with more treats than tricks.
