Summer, wherefore art thou...so rainy? And creepy...

Another week has blown by - literally. It has been cold, gray, rainy, and crappy here for the past week. We had a severe thunderstorm on Friday that knocked our internet service and telephones out until Tuesday afternoon. (More on that in a bit). My basement is leaking, my hair is frizzy, my flowerbeds got crushed by hail yesterday, and I truly believe I am suffering from a bout of S.A.D. in the summer. Sheesh!

In Princess/Athlete land, no real news, but he does still hold out hope. He came over and did some yardwork for me (hacked the hedges I can't reach), and we had a long conversation about Transubstantiation, his doubts, my attempt at apologetics was good (he gets it now) but not good enough (he still doesn't believe it). All the while the Princess lolled about in her bikini with a magazine and a diet 7-up, trying to soak up whatever rays she could between cloudbursts. She is back to work after only a week off after exams - 6 weeks of geometry tutoring (so she can skip a grade and accelerate toward calculus her junior year - ugh!), cheerleading practice three times a week, and ballroom two hours a week. No rest for the wicked. :)

Okay - now for the creepy bit. When the storm hit, lightening struck on the block behind us, between our house and the river. One of those instantaneous flash/crash things. Very scary. Less than 30 seconds later, three of the baby's "noisy toys" - Elmo, a car dashboard, and a school bus that sings that song - all spontaneously started making sounds. None are electric, all require pushing and pulling to get the sounds going. All were in different spots in the living room, and the baby was in bed for his afternoon nap. The girls and I looked at each other, and all the "warning hairs" on the back of my neck stood up, as happens when I get the feeling we are not alone in the house. I decided we should all repair to the basement to wait out the storm. We shut off all the electronics at their various power strips, grabbed the baby out of bed and went down - just as another huge crash hit outside.

When we came up, we heard a blast of static and a screeching sound through the computer speakers. The ones that we shut off at the power strip before we went downstairs. Then we looked out and discovered that a tree directly across the street from our house had been split down the middle. Utility wires and one of our own trees kept it from hitting the house, but part of it did knock out a USPS box that had been anchored into the cement for decades, by the looks of it. Crews came and took down the tree. A near miss.

Rational me says the electricity in the air must have somehow triggered the toys. Not-so-convinced me wonders if we got some forewarning....so I said "thank you" out loud and then said my prayers.

Hmmmmm.......

We still are finding strange things - a few fuses to parts of the house that are rarely used were blown, and two of eight phone jacks were fried, as were our cordless phones (one base unit, two handsets).

Freaky.

How's your summer going?

Tales from our Crypt #2 - Afterword

P.S. About a week after the stairs incident, we had enough snow and ice melt that I was confident enough to take the new puppy (the blonde Labradork) for a walk around the block. As I rounded the corner, I saw a Confederate flag on a very tall pole at the end of the street. I thought to myself Grrreeeeaaaat.....hardcore rednecks in 'hood.

As I got closer, I saw the Stars and Stripes flying high on another pole, which had been obscured by trees. I saw what looked to be a plaque or other sort of historical marker, so I made a beeline for it. There was an actual year-round display about....the Civil War prison camp. I looked at the map and the boundaries, and my house sits close to where the main gate was, and on top of where the Union officers' barracks and mess were. The infirmary [gulp] edged up into my back yard.

As you might imagine, this revelation on top of my "knowing" that my visitor was some sort of military man about floored me. I hobbled home as fast as I could, called the Beloved in CA, and started researching what little bits and pieces I could find online. I called my priest buddy up near Buffalo Road and asked him what to do until he could come down to bless the house. I booked out to the nearest Catholic store after we got off the phone. Each room and hallway has a crucifix now.

I didn't have another meeting with my friend until later that year. I'll get back to him later. There's more in the meantime.

Tales from our Crypt #2

Now it's Week 2 in the new house. [Keep in mind that at the time this happened, I still had no clue about the local history of my town]

The first day of the new school for the girls. So I am busy capitalizing on my solitude to start doing a ton of move-in laundry (sheets, towels, etc.) down in the basement/first floor. (The house sits on a little hillside, so the finished half and garage face out to the yard, while the cellar-ish parts have garden windows.)

As I bent over the dryer, dragging out a load of flannel sheets, I felt, rather than saw, someone enter the laundry room - it was a familiar feeling, as if the Beloved had walked in, not a scary feeling. But wait. Beloved was still in CA. I was alone in a new house. I gasped a little as it hit me, started and whipped my head over to look at the doorway. Empty, of course.

So I returned to the sheets, and at that moment I felt as though someone, once again, was standing right next to me, trying to help me. I got all hackle-y again, but continued working. All at once I knew that this was a man, and a military one at that, and suddenly I felt like I was being smiled at for being a stubborn female who tried to do everything herself, injuries and all. How or why I "knew" all this - well, I have no clue. I just did. I knew without a doubt that this "visitor" was a proud, proper, old fashioned military guy. But as sure as I can tell you what the Beloved does for a living and what his personality is like, I knew the same about whoever was visiting me.

And I thought it was crazy, and maybe I was finally losing it.

Then I started up the basement stairs to the kitchen with my wobbly knee and an overstuffed basket in my hands.

When I got near the top of the stairs, the door swung open on its hinges. Okay...old house. Must be a weight on the stairs thing, I told myself. Right. Never mind that the door hadn't done that on my first several trips up and down those stairs. I made it to the top as I had that thought, and then as I walked into the kitchen, the door swung back shut - and latched - behind me. I have fairly long hair. It had to be sticking straight out at this point...

"Thank you, sir." I said. And then I got the feeling whoever "Sir" was, he was happy, and he was bowing. Then he was gone.

This was a little over 5 years ago. I remember it like it was yesterday - the feelings and intuitions I had - everything.

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?!?!?)

Tales from our Crypt #1 - Introduction

All right - the results of the poll indicate that you're interested in our "houseguests" so here we go.

First, some historical background. Western/Central NY is not only a beautiful place, it is actually overflowing with early American history. The area where we live is close to the Finger Lakes, as well as to the confluence of the Susquehanna and Chemung Rivers, which were busy waterways and feeders to the Erie Canal. Major Revolutionary War battles took place within a few miles of our house, led by General Sullivan. [Quick novel and movie recommendation: Drums Along the Mowhawk...Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert...that loosely follows General Herkimer's campaign, which was to the northeast of here.] Large guns and munitions were buried and hidden along the river that is across the street from my back yard (great doggie walking...and dunking).

Religious freaks of all sorts sprang up from this region...Mormons, Oneidas, Shakers, Seventh Day Adventists. (It must be something in the water. You should see some of the people around here.) The women's rights movement, headed by Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Cady Stanton, came to life at Seneca Falls, just about an hour's drive from here. Passionate abolitionists lived and preached in our town. (The Beechers...and Ms. Beecher-Stowe) This area, with its frontier trading post past, established waterways and railways, was also chock-full of Underground Railroad stations. Mark Twain met and married his wife here, wrote his major novels here, and is buried a mile from my house.

But I digress.

Then there was the Civil War. No, there were no Civil War battles up here...however, there was a short-lived and rather lethal POW camp. I didn't know it when we moved here. Nor did I know that my house sits squarely on the site of the prison camp. In one winter, nearly 3,000 men - mostly from a unit of captured coastal Virgina oystermen - died in or near our back yard, between my house and the river.

Therein lies my first story...which I will post shortly.

Stay tuned...