Ghosts

As I drove around Indiana last summer I did not revisit some of the places and feelings I might have thought I would have. It might be because I did not have time. But I may have created new rituals or ways of saying goodbye to people and places I can only remember as existing a long time ago.

One time when I lived in Lafayette forty years ago, I was walking down Brown Street in Lafayette and felt like a time warp was just around the corner. Not really expecting anything transdimensional, but walking toward the Wabash down Brown Street, I knew I had to go by where my great-grandmother ran a boarding house before the Brown Street Bridge was destroyed by fire and again by flood. I walked the length of the street. I felt as though I should have known which house it was, but I did not find it. I liked the old, rather run down neighborhood. Rambling, overgrown yards blooming with old fashioned flowers. Beyond the neighborhood was the old train station near the river. Since that time it held a special place in my heart. Generations who did not know each other but who were connected to the same place.

So the evening after the butterfly release, I decided I wanted to get a nice hotel room down by the Wabash that overlooked the new, to me, new pedestrian bridge that connected down by the river

I walked across the bridge to downtown and had a sandwich, onion rings, and a beer that could have been a meal from 40 years ago with my ex. We undoubtedly ate in an establishment in the same building long since remodeled where I listened to bands for whom he mixed sound. It was bittersweet . Though we ended on very bad terms, I never completely stopped caring about him. He died 8 years before and I hadn’t been back to our old stomping ground since then. In a way it felt like I was finally saying good-bye to the ghost of a man who had appeared in my thoughts at the oddest of times, much like he did when he stalked me.

Above: Downtown Lafayette as seen through the restaurant window by the table where I lifted a glass in a toast all that was begun and never finished.

I felt lighter as I walked back across the bridge without the frayed connections of what had unravelled long ago. I took in the scents of river and fields as they were pushed into the valley on the winds of the coming storm.

I readied for bed, back at the hotel. I felt I needed to offer up some sort of thanks for everything working together to get me to the banks of Wabash River at that particular time and place where head and heart could realign themselves. I thought I would just turn off the tv that I’d flipped on to the to news, and just engage in contemplative meditation. 

Before I could even find the remote to turn off the tv, the screen sort of crackled, stations dropped, and twilight took over the hotel room. Electrical outage.

Then, in the few seconds it took to slip between the sheets, I was drifting to a different place where lightening slashed the sky, and crashes of thunder shook the air. It was delightful. I was a young girl again, watching the sky through the window screen wedged into a rickety window in my childhood home. The storm descending on the Wabash Valley was llike a hello from long, long ago summers, when I breathed in the coming storm-scent of ozone-rich air and watched roiling clouds of dark gray, and purple with hints of green tumble across my father’s fields from the vantage of my second story bedroom window. Time had melded then and now. The first few sprinkles of big fat, cold raindrops splashed across my face, “bloop- bloop- splat.” I was so into the scene, or memory, that I could not only feel the raindrops, but knew that my mother would soon call up the stairway to close all the windows before the rain ruined something.

This simple connection to the land and water of generations of my family was really the only thing that had been missing from my trip.  The walk had put me in touch with parts of myself I had not given the voice they obviously needed.

That night, the rain and wind, thunder and lightning, came to say a quick hello and goodbye as the storm lulled me to sleep as the ghosts of other times and places rearranged themselves in my mind and dreams so I could travel with the spirits of women I had never known knew who came to travel with me as I searched for my grandmother’s name and found her and her family’s story across the state.