1.
My next door neighbor has an old wooden puppet hanging from the ceiling in her pottery studio. She calls it "Mr. Thing." I didn't realize that it was possible to have very powerful reactions to inanimate objects until I met Mr. Thing. He is ominous, scary, even evil. When I visit the studio, I ask her to lock it in a closet. You may think me silly and perhaps I am, but there is something off about Mr. Thing. He carries with him a history, like awful events follow in his trail. It gives me chills every time I see it.
2.
When I was a little girl at Knapp Creek Elementary School, my best friend, Linda Felmlee, and I would walk to school early so we could sit on the swings and play for awhile before Mrs. Lundgren, the Principal, came out on the steps to clang her cowbell, signaling the village that school was open so get a move on.
It was a lovely spring morning much like this one. Suddenly, Linda stopped swinging and pointed skyward. "Look at that," she said. "Look." She was pointing at an oval silver shape that sat motionless in the sky above the houses across the road. We stared at it for several minutes, wondering and in awe. It was quite beautiful really. The object appeared completely still, it made no sound.
When we saw Mrs. Lundgren step out, we ran as fast as we could, shouting "Look! Look!" But when we got to the bottom of the schoolhouse steps and looked up again, the silver egg in the sky was gone. Just gone. Mrs. Lundgren responded to our excited chatter about a flying saucer with a curt, "You girls are just imagining things." As children, we knew our story would never be believed by grown-ups.
A few years later when I was a teenager, our neighbor and my mother's best friend, Madge, was sitting at our kitchen table. Over coffee, she rather
sheepishly confided to Mother that once, a few years before, early one spring morning she had been outside hanging clothes on the line, when she saw a floating silver oval object suspended in the sky above her house. Back then, her house had been directly across the road from the elementary school. Finally, the grown-ups believed.
3.
There are mysteries that cannot be solved.
I am talking about something that happened in 1957 or '58. Do you remember the kind of terrified that perhaps only a child can feel? Alone in the dark in their bed? I do. When I would wake in the night, the ceiling seemed alive with ominous shapes, shifting in the air above me. Though my big sister was sleeping only a few feet away, I could never bring myself to call out to her.
Frozen in place, I was convinced that with even the slightest movement or sound those dark shapes would take form and descend upon me in an instant. Just opening my mouth to speak might alert them to my consciousness, my awareness of their being. Slowly, so slowly I would inch my blanket up to cover my eyes. Or just close my eyes and pray they would be gone when I opened them again.
One night, something different happened. I woke in the night and saw a man standing at the foot of my bed. He was dressed in robes and had long hair. He stood slender and silent. He was no ordinary man. I thought he was an angel, but was terrified nonetheless. I looked at him for what seemed a very long time. He never moved or spoke, he was a presence only. Eventually, exhausted, I fell asleep.
