What’s Happening?

On December 11th, I picked up some effects, papers pertaining to family history, that had belonged at one time to my aunt Elizabeth Van Doren Ankers. In the top of the box was a letter from 1947, sent from the Russian sector of Berlin, concerning a German woman my father had been engaged to, at age 19, before he came home and met my mother. This is something neither I nor any of my siblings had known about. In any case, the letter informed my grandmother – Dad’s mother – of the woman’s death in a railway accident. The date of her death: December 11th.

A few days later, I signed a contract to edit and produce a book commemorating the anniversary of the founding of a local hospice. That night, we turned on the television, as we usually do – currently, having exhausted our favorite rentable series, we’re going episode by episode through a British series, Midsomer Murders, that belongs quite solidly to the second tier.

That night’s show: murders involving the founding of a hospice.

O.K., fine. A few nights later, the episode was titled “Dead in the Water,” It included several references to rats, including a dead one. Meanwhile, we had placed a vase under a leaky pipe. Surprising that nothing like this had ever happened in 15 years of living in a house so permeable to mice, but, you guessed it: that very night, a mouse ... literally ‘dead in the water’.

(We often are aware of having a mouse or two around – no rats that I know of, although for a while we suspected we were hosting a mouse we called, thanks to The Princess Bride, a ROVUS – Rodent of Very Unusual Size.) 

The next one is not quite as unnerving. Last night, as the snowstorm was finally ending, our lights kept flickering – the power would go off for half a second – and we kept wondering, especially given our many power outages here in the country – Are we about to lose power? We filled more water jugs (important if you depend on a well) and made other preparations. We didn’t lose power, fortunately. And that meant we could watch another episode! This one just happened to take place at Christmastime (not a planned coincidence). It opens with folks placing Christmas lights outside ... and seeing them go out for a moment.

“Not another power cut!” they cry, before power comes back on – and someone inside the house shoots himself.

So, that’s it, up to the moment, I think. Perhaps I should be worried, except that strange synchronicities have happened to me many times before – just not quite so thick and fast. As for the connections to mortality, I ignore them – or take them simply as a sign of something serious. Something’s happening – I wonder if I’ll ever understand what it is.