so something has me talking about spooks lately

People around me who know how much I enjoy pop-science are surprised that I see ghosts. I see them routinely and without shock, and I have done since childhood. I see them with ease, sometimes as familiars, and sometimes as cheeky interlopers who just need to be reminded that they don’t (even if they did at some stage) pay the rent, mortgage or bills.

I grew up in a family where we talked easily about the ghosts, not always seriously, but aloud nonetheless. Dad thought it all mad but could scare me witless with old bush-tales of ghosts that roamed the desert around Burke where he walked and worked as a young man with his Dad.
They were joked about, occasionally complained about, often referred to, and always with a sense of tongue in cheek. Yet they prevailed in so many women-chats that they have always capered down the hallways of my childhood in a way that is as real and ‘feelable’ as the woof and weave of the beige-pile-carpet or patterned olive-green bathroom tiles.

Aunty Shirl had the ghost of ‘crazy Eileen’ show up at a jokey drunken séance she hosted. Eileen was a family member who’d died young and with Alzheimer’s. Aunty Mavis had the woman who’d gassed herself to death in the flat years before. On the night he died our Uncle Ian came to see my brother Dean, then fourteen, to tell him not to worry but to look after Dad. Dean is as pretty straight up kind of bloke but still gets shivery thinking about it.
One night when I was ten I dreamed that Nana came and tucked me in. the next morning I was having the usual cuppa in bed with Mum and she said she’d dreamed that she and Nana were sharing a Dixie cup ice-cream. The phone rang and we got the news that she’d died.
In a rental property in Vermont I lived in at five there were the doors to the lounge that opened, the gas oven that went on overnight causing panicked evacuations, the awful passing odours in the hallway and my bedroom blinds would be flung up often overnight. I saw one in a flat in Windsor at twenty, a sad woman dressed for work at the end of my bed, and recently one in my lounge; an old woman clutching a brown cardigan to her chest and looking startled by me. Interestingly neither Mum nor I have tuned in to male ones!

I do ‘see’ them, but not as fady-apparitions all see through, or as real people. I see them as I feel them as a high-speed flat image like a photo transposed over what is ‘really’ there, and I’ve just learned to assume/trust that the image I see so quickly is probably an intuitive representation, not a photo…maybe its even how they saw themselves. But the mind is a tricksy and old sea and who knows what shells it has shored up in its depths.

The other ways in which I ‘see’ them are as odours or darkness’s. Sometimes in a Spring-lit room that is positively twitching with light reflections there is simply a dark shape at the edge. Pay attention to it. At other times I reckon I’ve walked through a ghost fart, and phew are they dank and malodorous!

I used to think they were always about place, but now I wonder…my son has definitely attracted shadows, sound, lights and fizz. He’s made ‘things’ happen around the home that are new. Just new. Not scary, though sometimes in the night the expanse of black hallway from loo to bed can seem cooler than it should, my bare ankles feel strangely vulnerable and I feel the icy gaze of the other pressing the skin tighter on my shoulder blades, envious and seething as it watches me flee on warm and alive patty-feet back to the bed…

Fais do do

In the dark of a New Orleans eve folks might gather for a Fais do do. Strangely this translates as a wild party of dance, song, food and flirtation. The phrase actually comes from this gorgeous old French Lullaby that Creoles have kept alive in New Orleans. I believe it translates as 'to your dormier' (bedroom) and was sung as babes were swept off to bed. That it then became the phrase for staying up late and partying all night was reflective of an ironic or falsely authorative command- 'off to bed with you now'. it is a beautiful lullaby, of simple melody and comorting meaning:

Fais do do, Colas mon petit frere
Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother,

Fais do do, t'auras du lolo.
Go to sleep, and you'll have a treat.

Maman est en haut, Elle fait des gateaux
Mama is upstairs making cakes,

Papa est en bas, Il fait du chocolat.
Papa is downstairs making chocolate.

Fais do do, Colas mon petit frere
Go to sleep, Colas, my little brother,

Fais do do, t'auras du lolo.
Go to sleep,
and you'll have a treat.



just perfect, which is why I'm learning it.
lily

Pregnant

It's a loaded word isn’t it, something we often spend most of our youth desperately avoiding, then perhaps part of our life chasing to varying lengths and extremes of intervention.

My periods have always been wacky, very heavy, and I also in the last five years have had PMT blow out to encompass a fortnight, something pretty unfair on those around me! In the last year it seems I’ve gone peri-menopausal, and that could last ages and just means periods are very irregular. Two in a month? Sure! Then a two month wait? Sure!
So figuring that there were no ‘safe’ times I could guarantee the Captain did the noble thing and sorted out a vasectomy. Done and dusted? No way.
After three months of postoperative tests he was down to 1% ‘motile’ sperm. So we thought we’d still play a bit safely (fill in the details you’re all wize enough too) but a whole night sans Finn (who was having a blast eating ice-cream and being generally spoilt at Na and Pa’s house) combined with a blissful sleep in, coffee in bed and some amorous snuggling and well, you know what happens.
So three weeks late I last night lay awake, breasts hot and hard, just knowing that irony with a big I might be playing a big trick on us. I hopped online (as you do when insomnia and a health concern kick in to keep you awake for five hours) and Lo- entire forums devoted to the multitude of women having unplanned pregnancies after their partners had vasectomies. Turns out that ‘sperm motility reactivation’ does not seem to be the one in five thousand chance listed in the vasectomy brochure, or if so then every one is online and talking about their shocking news.
I’m a feminist, know my rights and have always been willing to avail myself of them should the need arise, but it seemed (at 4am anyway) that anything that damned determined to find is way might need to be admired, even if not welcomed.
I spent the rest of then night organising space logistics in the home, and figuring out that Finn would be out of (expensive) day care before the zygote was in it, and that I still had some long service leave to add to maternity leave, and there was someone who could walk into my job (but might have needed poisoning to exit it!). Not excited, certainly not, but pragmatic and considering, yes.
All the while my breasts ached and tingled (the biggest surest sign of early pregnancy) and I pondered why I felt disloyal to Finn in thinking that the pregnancy could continue to its conclusion, a sibling for him and the whole crazy treadmill again for us.

I took a train to Newport, where an old-fashioned strip of red-brick shops hosts a chemist. I bought my package and came home and waited for wee, which can be slow when you’re clenched all over.
I just tested negative, having kept my eyes shut and refusing to look for much longer than the required three minutes.
Despite all the ‘planning’ I went through I know the vasectomy was the right choice, for when I saw that blue stripe flying solo I whooped with relief.
one little word, so loaded. It's like the shortest story ever told really.

and about the image? well someone told me recently that blogs are personal, no matter that the audience could be known, or not, or small, or big.
lily.