Tales from our Crypt #1, cont'd.

All right. You now have more background info than I did when we first moved here.

The Beloved retired from his beloved Corps. I was burnt out from 5 years of non-stop litigation and not seeing my kids much. On paper, we were living a great life in San Diego, but we weren't enjoying life - too many obligations, long commutes, and no family time at all.

So we decided to simplify life, move back to his family's homeland, and seek quality of life as a family. We'd looked at houses here and there the summer before we moved, and I fell in love with a particular house. But it sold to someone else while we were mulling over the move. In October, it was back on the market. It was meant to be. We took out a home equity loan (courtesy of the real estate craze in CA) and bought it outright, and put our CA house on the market. It sold within 2 weeks, and the movers came the second week of December. We slept on air mattresses until school let out for break.

The girls and I transplanted here after Christmas to get started in school, while Beloved finished out his job with the City. We arrived from a 1,500 sf CA bungalow house to a 4,300 sf, 4 story big brick monstrosity of an "old money" rural NY banker's custom built 1920's house. There were boxes everywhere. (I bought up enough furniture and extra beds before we left to fill the extra bedrooms and maxed out our terminal military move weight allowance). It was so exciting...but...problem: shortly before Thanksgiving, I blew out my knee playing softball in the San Diego County Bar Association's league - shredded ACL & PCL - so I was limping around in a brace, having decided to put off reconstructive surgery until after I was safely in NY. If I didn't have the brace on, my knee would randomly buckle and collapse - all the ligaments were torn, so nothing was holding the joint together. So I wasn't supposed to do much unpacking, toting, lifting, or hauling. But of course I did.

Day 2 in new house. I was carrying a box of linens upstairs. Knee hyperextended and gave out. I started to fall backwards down the stairs, no time to drop the box and grab the railing. As I started to panic, I felt as though my back hit a net, and I bounced off it and fell forward onto the landing. I sat there for a few seconds, gathering myself, wondering if I'd had a dizzy spell because it seemed so strange that I was falling backwards and yet somehow managed to end up falling forward with the box onto the landing. I even noticed a crack in the ceiling as I fell, looking skyward as I was. I looked up from where I sat, and there it was - not my imagination, a big crack. I shook my head a few times, trying to figure it all out. I felt a reassuring hand squeeze my shoulder and I turned, expecting to see the Princess there, comforting me. But there was no one there. The girls were up on the third floor, squealing and bickering, tearing through boxes and establishing their new playroom. Yet I felt as though someone was still sitting on the stair right next to me, steadying and reassuring me.

That's when the hair on the back of my neck stood up for the first time.

I sat there for a long time pondering the implications of what had just happened, and I ended by thanking my guardian angel out loud for helping me, having decided that's who had saved me from what would have been a really bad fall. When I did that, the feeling of the kind "presence" at my side disappeared. I felt strangely sad and disappointed, thinking that my guardian angel would rather take off instead of staying awhile longer after I spoke aloud to him/her.

There were more visits to come, however.

I will continue tomorrow - stay tuned.... (Or should we say attuned?!?!?)