Grand Mysteries In Everyday Miraculous Life

When I used to live in a ten by fifty foot trailer with two children and a husband, I used to dream that I would find extra rooms. I'd open an until-then unknown door and there would be a room. A real room.
And when I woke up, it would be gone and the magical door would have disappeared.
Now I live with no children and one husband in large house and we have many extra rooms. Some I never even go in. I don't climb those stairs from one week to the next.




But I like knowing those rooms are up there, one of them Miss HoneyLuna's, in case she needs to come home and one of them a sort of spare guestroom and spare it is. There is a bed, a vanity, a light, a chair. Not very cozy, but it will do when we need it.

My "real" guestroom is downstairs and I love that room. I call it the Panther Room because of the light I bought in a little place in Keystone Heights called the Pack Rat. I think I saw it and craved it for two years before I finally bought it and brought it back here to this wonderful old house I live in.



I hear that at one time in its history, this house was a stop-off for truck drivers who wanted a cold beverage and a little female company. Supposedly, the room that I now call the Panther Room was where the pool table was located and which was where the fellas could spend a little time until it was their turn to visit the ladies, who worked upstairs.
I have no idea if this is true, but it's quite possible. I live right off a road which connects Highway 27 and Highway 90, which would have been convenient.

Who knows? Not me. But I love having this room for folks to stay in when they come and visit. Big Lou and Maxine are frequent guests (although not frequent enough to suit me) and various relatives have stayed here, including Mr. Moon's sister who slept in that bed during a hurricane and I'm sure she'll never forget that night.

Anyway, last night an old friend of mine slept in the Panther Room.
This is a friend I've known since high school. Over the years we have, for some reason, stayed in touch, first with real letters written on paper and mailed in envelopes with stamps and now by e-mail. Type, hit send. Done. I wonder how many words we've sent each other over all the years of our communication. No way to tell. But it's a miracle to me that we've done this and it means so much to me, somehow, that we still care enough to tell each other our news, to stay in touch, to say Tell me how it goes, what have you learned this week? How's the grandson? Did you hear? I'm going to be a grandmother! Here's a poem I wrote. What do you think?
It's rare that we actually see each other, but sometimes we get the chance.
He had to be in Tallahassee yesterday for a solar energy thing and spent the night with us. When he came in after the conference Mr. Moon mixed the martinis and I ladled out the soup and sliced the bread and after we ate and laughed and cleaned up, we were all ready for bed by ten thirty and he went to sleep in the Panther Room.
By the time I got up this morning, he was already hard at work on his laptop and I gave him a smoothie for his breakfast and he was out of here by seven forty-five to get back to Central Florida, his wife and his law practice.

And now I'm here, all alone in this big old house, thinking of times long gone but that seem like yesterday in my mind.

I wonder what this house would think about if it could think. Ladies of the night (or afternoon, more likely), births, deaths, marriages, fallings-in-love, merry times, cozy times, hard times, stormy times.
I took another picture of the guest room with the flash on and when I looked at it, there were "orbs" in it.



This same thing happens when people take pictures at the Opera House but I think they're just dust or light reflection.

But who the hell knows? Maybe they are the spirits of the people who have lived and died in these old rooms, but really is it any less profoundly interesting to think that long after we're gone a small bit of dust made up of our skin, having hidden for years between two boards, will rise up to become a ghostly orb in a picture?

Anyway, it's nothing short of a miracle to me. All of it. The dust, our bones, the laughter, the breaking of bread, the life we're living, the fact that friends can be friends for almost forty years and that we can welcome our friends, hug them in welcome, say so wonderful to see you, tuck them up in a Panther Room to sleep, then hug them in goodbye the next morning.

Say come back soon.

Your room will be waiting.

So wonderful to see you.

And as I wrote that sentence, a burst of cold air came through and the two front doors swung wide open, which I do not understand as they are latched in two separate places.

So many mysteries in this life. And isn't that grand?

I don't want to know everything. Sometimes I just want to be grateful for sudden bursts of something that make our hearts swing wide open, even if we think they're latched. That remind us of how cozy we are, how lucky, how very, very blessed by the everyday miracles of love and friendship and extra rooms and the dust of our skin, making ghosts of us perhaps while we are still, in fact, very much here, like the memories we have which arise up and are suddenly a part of our present as well as our past.

The dust rises up, the camera catches it, magnifies it, makes it visible.
The old friend visits, the memories rise up, we make them visible with our sharing over soup.

We are still here. We are still there.
I don't quite understand.

But I am grateful for the mysteries and the miracles, as prosaic as dust, as startling as ghosts, as real as the house where I sit on this cold clear day, old yet strong, all the molecules bouncing around, zipping and zooming, even as they appear to be still.