Down the Rabbit Hole

Home Sweet Home and the Spirital Visitors We Welcome

Blogging Circle of Friends
DAY 1167: January 25, 2016

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition" - ROD SERLING Prompt: Write a story, poem, or personal experience based on this quote.

I have had a few experiences in my life that I would say touched on the think veil between worlds, primarily those of the living and the dead. In all instances, my experiences were more intimate, meaning, I believe those spirits were known to me, not random visitations but for a specific purpose. On more than one occasion during a particularly dark period in my life, I would suddenly and inexplicably surrounded by the smell of smoking tobacco. The odor was so strong and familiar, I would swear I would see my grandfather sitting here, the tortoise-shell pipe clasped between his lips, one hand clutching a tumbler half filled with amber-colored liquid. As soon as my mind would register the scent of his tobacco brand, it would be gone - vanished completely, as if it had never filled my senses so fully. In its wake, I would always feel strangely comforted.

One time, when my daughter was about eight months old, I was sitting in the rocker in her room, balancing her on chubby, bouncing legs. All of a sudden, my daughter when still. She locked eyes with something behind me, just over my right shoulder. I whipped my head around but only saw the empty corner behind my rocker. My daughter began to toggle her head from one side to the next, giggling and smiling, her bright eyes darting back and forth in time with the movement of her head. "She's playing peekaboo," I thought, and then, "but with someone else."
I tried to turn her attention back to me but she was fixed on her game, fixed on that space in front of her. She waved her arms and emitted little shrieks of delight.

Startled, I watched my daughter for a few more minutes, holding onto to her animated body with fingertips that felt cold as ice. Then, Jaden Melanie turned her head as if to follow someone passing from behind me, pass my right side. Jaden's struggled to watch their progress, I had to turn her toward the door so she wouldn't strain her next. I remember actually turning her body toward the open door of her room. She never broke eye contact, never stopped cooing or smiling. After a few moments, she turned back and looked at me. Her attention again was all mine, her apparent visitor having moved on. I recall this moment with not fear, despite my pounding heart, but with a strange mixture of grief and joy. My daughter, I believe to this day, was visited by her own special guardian angel. We had lost my cousin Melanie five months before my daughter was born. Despite our prayers, Melanie never lived to see the birth of the little girl who bears her name in honor. I believe she watches over her as much as I belief that day Melanie stepped through the delicate veil of the spirit world to pay my little girl a visit. It brought my heart immeasurable comfort.




Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise
DAY 688 January 25, 2016
Here are 4 locations New York, London, Beijing and your location. Tell me what you expect and don't expect in each location. Are there any commonalities that jump out at you? Could you relocate there easily?

My good friend recently moved to Manhattan. While she is incredibly happy and well-suited to the city life, I am always overwhelmed to visit her. While the city offers seemingly endless opportunities to be dined and entertained, it does seem to swallow you up. The pace of life there seems to run too quickly for a person like me to catch up, to keep up. I expect that things are bigger and better in the Big Apple. I also expect that it isn't for everyone. I think New York is a place you dream about living while you are young enough to imagine life there but its a place that can make you harder if you stay there too long.

Before my brief visit to London, I imagined it a charming place filled with bustle and pomp. I imagined that Big Ben appeared in life as it did when Peter and the Darling Children flew past its glowing face in Peter Pan - larger than life and fantastical, a signature of the city itself. We visited London during Spring Break when I was in college. We took on the city's hostels, crowded markets, doubledecker tour buses and stoic faced Buckingham guards armed with our backpacks and youthful exuberance. It was, as near as I can remember, how I pictured it and more.

Beijing - I've not traveling to Beijing but I imagine it a place of rich colors and customs. I think it must be a city that is both equal parts modern and ancient. I picture beautiful and slight women just as fitting posing beneath a red bamboo parasol as they would be in a sharp business suit. I imagine old structures tucked between great, glass skyscrapers. I would love to visit one day but confess I am daunted by the vastness of such a place.

I make my home these days in Southern New England, not far from Mystic, CT where the river and its drawbridge have been forever memorialized by one little movie and it's big star. Mystic Pizza is, in reality, not the best we have to offer in our state but its what many of the seasonal tourists want when they descend on us each summer. Connecticut, at times, seems easy to dismiss as the last great suburb of NYC, but it does have some lovely attributes and certainly an attitude all its own. There are lots of quaint, New England towns like Essex and Old Lyme where you can see the pride of the Yankee settlers that forged life here on the rocky land. Shore towns like Old Saybrook and Noank are picturesque, a blending of old fishing village meets the new and modern. Big houses overshadow the old capes and colonials that sport unrivaled views and Historical Register signs on their antique facades. The Connecticut River valley in the Fall season is breathtakingly beautiful as you coast past beautiful properties tucked into thick forests of trees bursting with reds, golds and yellows. There is a lot of diversity here in this state, from one corner to the next. As much as I often threaten to relocate, its hard to picture myself anywhere but here.