Category Archives: Uncategorized

So, my new life in Iowa is going slowly. Unable to drive a car. Unable to stay in writer mode for more than a few minutes at a time. I am basically just getting by. Paying bills on time. Staying alive one day at a time. Reposting old posts on WordPress most of the time instead of writing new ones.

We have gotten snow on the ground since Saturday. You can see it is going away. The snow is sublimating, going from snow crystals to water vapor in the afternoon sun. This picture of the actual yard and snowy cornfields beyond is what I used AI tools on to make the first Paffooney in this post.

None of the planned novel writing I meant to do has started. I have been drawing and playing with digital art tools, but even that has its arthritic limitations, and it takes AI manipulations to make the junk into gems.

I have been seeing things that aren’t really there a lot recently. Grandpa Aldrich’s black cat, Midnight, hopped up on the bed two weeks ago, though Midnight died at twenty-two years of age more than twenty years ago. If ghosts are real, he still prowls and protects the farm house in a spiritual sense.

Two nights ago I fell asleep in the easy chair while watching TV with my sister. I awoke with a start. An old woman with gray hair in a bun was shaking my right arm and asking, “Are you alright?” I realized with a sudden shock that it wasn’t my sister, Nancy. And as I realized it, she dissolved right before my eyes. That same night, I got up in the middle of the night, went out to the kitchen, and suddenly saw the same old woman standing over the ironing board that Nancy had left set up in the dining room. She was holding an old flat iron of the kind you heat up on the wood-burning stove before using, like Great Grandma Hinckley had shown me about sixty years ago. She was looking at me. Not moving. And fading away into nothing as I watched her with my mouth hanging open. That might’ve been a dream, but an extremely vivid one.

And last night I saw her again through the open bathroom door as she stood in the living room. She told me without opening or moving her mouth, “Don’t be afraid. I am watching over you. You are family. I love you though you were born after I passed on.”

I know it could’ve been another dream. It was more likely the onset of Parkinson’s Disease. Hallucinations are a symptom of that disease. It is how I rationalize seeing the ghosts of the ghot dog in Carrollton, and the ghost of my late dog, Jade before I moved to Iowa. But more intriguing is the notion that it is someone who lived and died in this house, my Great Grandma Emily Brannen, Grandpa Aldrich’s mother. That notion is more appealing than Parkinson’s or dementia.

Sometimes when you get to be moldy old and decomposing you have to stop and have a rethink about the meaning of certain things. You have to let the computer in your head reset, reboot, and download the various needed patches in the old software. It is the only way to move forward and get things done.