The temperature was in the 80’s. Small, light clouds drifted across the sky. And tiny white flakes fell through the air.
What?
It looked like a micro-snowfall. That, I knew, was impossible.
Am I seeing things? Hallucinating? Losing my fragile grip on reality? No, as you can see, the leaf bears witness, there was something falling down.
Pollen? It certainly is prime season for it here in South Texas–I’d been sneezing for weeks. It just didn’t look like pollen though.
I sniffed the air but smelled no smoke. I looked up to my roof and saw the white drifting down on to the shingles. I saw it on my stone patio. I looked in the front yard. It was falling there, too.
I called my husband Wayne who works at KNBT-FM, the local radio station. He had no clue so turned to newsman David Ferguson. “What’s with the white ash falling from the sky?”
“Why?”
“Don’t know,” David said, “but it’s all over the police scanner.”
David then investigated the weird phenomenon. Apparently, there was a controlled burn up on Loop 337–too far away for me to smell but close enough to make its presence known.
One night last week, we watched Garden of Death, an episode of Midsomer Murder on a Netflix DVD. In it, someone entered a woman’s garden cut the heads off of all her flowers and arranged them into the classic shape of a chalk-marked body.The next morning, without giving the show a thought, I went out and thoroughly dead-headed our red Knock-out rose. That afternoon, Wayne went out in the garden and froze. All the blooms were gone. His mind instantly flew to the episode we’d just watched. He scanned the garden looking for anything odd. I joined him outside. He turned a bewildered face to me. “Did you dead-head the roses?”
I instantly realized why that freaked him out, laughed and walked away. I had to wonder, though, was it merely coincidence or was my subconcious being wicked.
I can’t remember where I ran across the name “Chillicothe” the other morning. But when I did, I noticed it as I do with some unfamiliar words. I rolled the sound of it over my tongue. I noticed how it was spelled. I mentally filed it away.
That afternoon, Wayne’s mother gave him a call. I sat near him busy on my laptop while he talked. He turned to me and said, “Can you go to Google and see if there is a town named Chillicothe in New York State?”
I knew how to spell it without a thought and had already entered the search by the time he’d passed along the spelling of the name from his mother. “No,” I said, “There’s a Chillicothe in Texas, one in Ohio, a Chillicothe in Missouri and another in Illinois. Don’t see any in New York. Why did you ask?”
He then told me about his mother’s dream about travelling from Utica, New York, to Chillicothe but she’d never heard of the place. I said, “I have. This morning. That’s how I knew how to spell it.”
Yeah, that is weird.
I think there are probably weird things like these in every day but we’re too busy moving through life to notice them. I’m always pleased when I do.
I just looked up “weird things” in Google images. Now that was really weird–a lot weirder than anything that has happened to me. Maybe my life is a bit too tame.