When I first moved into a remodeled 100-year-old bungalow in Tampa, I wondered if it was haunted. After all, that’s a long time, and I do believe in ghosts. It took a year and a half before “something happened.”
I’ve seen a couple of ghosts over the years, plus two angels (that I know of), but that’s another story or two or three. I have written about those experiences, including incorporating some of them into Rite of Letting Go, which is about dealing badly with losing the people you love as you age. When I started that novel, I didn’t know much about where it was going except that there were several versions of ghosts of loved ones. Having lost several people close to me since 2020, I found the writing of both Rite of Letting Go and Rite of Reckoning to be very cathartic.
And since the past week was cathartic in another way, I had to wonder if ghosts were visiting me in my home in Tampa last night. See, I got home late yesterday after spending the week at my late mother’s old house on our farm back in Georgia. This was my second trip up there to clean out her place, and it was heavy physical work—18-hour days—as well as emotional labor. Going through all the objects that had meant the world to her and no one else, finding old photos from my childhood, discovering she’d kept newspaper clippings from when I was a teen-aged columnist for four-plus newspapers—all things that had to be done, and my brother and I did it alone.
By the time the old house was cleaned out of all the things my mom left to me and my car was packed to the gills with her library of first editions and classics, I had time to spend with the nature spirits on the farm. I walked the dirt road—barefoot. I watched the sunset.
I made peace. Closure.
“My grandfather’s spirit had stayed close to me in those days, reassuring me. Not long after I married again and Jesse moved in with the girls and me, I stopped seeing him hanging around the premises and protecting us. He moved on after that, and I like to think that he is enjoying a new incarnation somewhere and that we will meet again in my lifetime”– Rite of Letting Go
Then headed back to Tampa, to where I now call “home.”
I didn’t finish unpacking my car last night because I had no one to hold the front door open for me, and instead, I snuggled up in my favorite chair around midnight to unkink my back from the long drive and outline my plans for the next week. No one else was home at the time, so I had plenty of quiet to recuperate from all the mental burdens of the past week. I’d been sitting there for about 20 minutes in my nice quiet house when I heard…wind chimes. My security system for the back patio sounds like wind chimes, so I bounced up out of my seat, grabbed my sword, and headed toward the back door while checking my security camera.
Nothing at all captured on my camera.
Nothing outside either.
*Odd.*
(Odd as in the lack of intruder, not the fact that I just naturally grab a sword for defense.)
I went back to my chair, and less than a minute later, I heard the wind chimes again. I turned off the AC and anything that might make a sound and again listened hard for the source. The sound wasn’t coming from outside.
Which meant…this sound was coming from inside my home.
Where I was relaxing alone.
Where there are two sets of wind chimes that are there more for looks and sentiment than for the sound. The ones at the back door sound like the pipe organ I played in the Southern Baptist church back home. Deep, resonant. Not the right match for what I was hearing.
The other chimes were in my home office, between my front door and my desk. They’re colorful and pretty in the late sunshine of the day. They’re light and tinkling, but only when a breeze hits them, like when opening a door. Or when the oscillating fan wafts incense at them on a warm day. They’re not, I remember suddenly, under a vent.
And the AC is off.
So is the fan.
And the door is closed. Or is it?
The chimes tinkle once again in my home office as I stalk back through the house toward the darkened office and locked—?—front door. I poke my head around the office door. I’m not sure what I expect to see—an intruder?
But the door is still closed. Still locked. No one’s there.
A ghost?
I brought home some sentimental items that have been in my family for several generations. Did I bring home some ancestral spirit? Is it some Tampa ghost that’s been lingering since I moved in and likes all these antiques from Georgia?
I freeze in the doorway, sword still in my grip, and watch in the dim corner where the wind chimes clink lightly. Must be a breeze. Must be. Is there a broken window?
Without taking my eyes off the corner, without turning on a light, I throw one hand up to feel for a breeze.
No breeze, but the chimes flutter wildly.
Almost as if saying hello.
I’m squinting at the dim corner and the wind chimes, but no one answers back. Just wild fluttering.
“H-hello?” I call out.
I’m not afraid of ghosts, I promise. But is that what I’m seeing? My first ghostly encounter in this century-old house? With me standing here amid boxes of my late mother’s books?
Without looking away, I feel behind me, along the wall, for the switch to the chandelier that hangs over my desk. The light blinds me for a split second as I stare at the dim corner, coming to life in full color, still fluttering wildly.
And then a lizard leaps from the wind chimes to the wall.
A little gecko lizard that likes to hang out on the front steps and gets curious about the cooler atmosphere beyond the front door, especially when it’s left slightly ajar so I can carry in armloads of old books.
No ghosts. Not ghosts of Tampa. Not ancestral ghosts along for the ride from the trip back home. Just a little lizard staring back at me and my humongous broadsword.
Unless, of course, one of those ghosts prompted that lizard to sneak into my house and swing from the wind chimes.
For every woman who has ever felt invisible, wondered what comes next, or dared to believe the best is yet to come.
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