I found this piece in a journal app on my phone that I haven’t really been using lately. It was written a year ago today. I’m not sure why I never shared it anywhere before.

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I’m seeing ghosts today

Today I looked around the corner of my parents house and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw her sitting there. She was in the glider, rocking it by pushing one foot against the concrete floor, hand against her chin like it always was when she was thinking. She was looking out at a blur of green and brown – the barn and the freshly mowed field. Everything was a blur since her eyesight had started failing years before.

“Whatchya doing, Grandma?” I might would say.

:Oh, just enjoying the cooler weather,” she’d say.

“Not contemplating world domination then?”

She’d laugh fully, head back and squint at me from the shaded place she was sitting.

“No, no. I wouldn’t want that,” she might say.

And she would rock and then Leonardo, the fat cat someone dropped off at my parents’ no-longer used barn, would climb up and sit next to her. She was the only person he’d let pet him, pressing his little form against her thigh as she stroked him and rocked and enjoyed the cool weather.

Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw another ghost, brushing a cat, then turning to water a plant.

“Whew. Sure glad for this cooler weather,” she’d say. “Lordy Lordy. It’s been hot, girl.”

She’d take a swig from her bottle of Diet Pepsi, the one she shouldn’t be drinking, and sit back on that same glider Grandma and used to sit on and look out over the green hills, the dirt road weaving between them.

“Sho is purty today, ain’t it?” She would ask, exaggerating her southern accent for fun.

“Sho is,” I’d say.

Together we’d look out over the fields, my dad’s garden, the children chasing each other, the dog chasing them, the cat lounging on the deck railing and we would sigh a contented sigh.

I’m seeing ghosts today because they’re all gone – grandma, Dianne , even the cats. But somehow it’s like they’re still there – the shape of them – the feel of them – the sight of them out of the corner of my eye.

Sometimes it’s like they’re still there – on the fringe of it all, the chaos of life, the struggles, the joys, just sitting on the glider, rocking it back and forth, enjoying the cooler weather, never fully gone; wisps of a reality I’ll touch again one day.