It's no secret that I have a sense of the spiritual world.  Not in a wicked kind of way but in an palpable awareness of more than meets the eye, an internal knowledge that something lies against my peripheral - that cotton wisp shadow that dances on the edge of my attention.  There is some comfort in sharing my existence with their secrets - some affirmation to my faith in the unseen.  Of course, it could be the curse of a creative reality - these lenses that look upon the world with more heart and less brain - this overactive imagination that let's me build worlds of wonder and possibility and metaphor.  Who knows.  I only know that there are truths around me that can't be explained with intellect or reason.  Like God.  Like angels.  Like...ghosts?

This home that holds my history has also held the history of something more - something that hangs about the stairs and teases with a darting shadow - never dark - never ominous or dangerous.  Playful, even...

Midnight begs heavy eyes and the movie has ended - warm blankets a siren call from the bedroom.  He's going for one last cigarette, beginning the climb from the basement.  Only a few steps up.  "Oh - that's creepy," he says.  "Did you put that doll there?"

"What doll?" I ask.  "I've been down here since the kids went to sleep...and nobody's been up since."

"It's just staring down at me..." he says and an uncomfortable chill raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

I unfold myself from the couch and come to the bottom of the stairs.

I think it might be her sweetness that is most unsettling of all.  Hand-stitched by my grandmother, dress crafted from the same material of one of my own childhood dresses, face painted on creamy cotton by those storied hands - the same that braided the yarn hair and brushed my own to sleep as a little girl.  And I cherish her - this doll made for me when I was already an adult.  And she stares down at us, acrylic blue eyes alive with mischief...

Logic would say that she was knocked from her perch upon the ladder shelf on his last pass down the stairs before we started the movie, bumped softly to fall softly - to land perfectly on her bottom on the top step, facing forward, innocently eerie - a completely coincidental accident.

But my adventurous curiosity begs another explanation...

"Too creepy," he says again and moves her from the step to a spot on the floor by the fake, potted tree.  "I'm not putting it back up there." And he means on the shelf.  Because it might happen again. 

He's never shared my belief in anything beyond what we can actually see.  He's too logical to waste energy on it.  But he was rattled for a moment.  So maybe I'm not so crazy after all...