Monday, April 25, 2022

Chaucer

 For the entire time I lived there, I always referred to the house as Chaucer.  Considering Geoffrey Chaucer's most famous works are the Canterbury Tales, it made perfect sense to me.  Although it's unlikely others would have clued in to things like that.  But while The Garage and Mountain Top were active residences for me and the Cul-de-Sac wasn't, Chaucer seemed to be a quietly active place from even before we moved in.  

My brother bought the house as a fixer-upper and boy, did it ever need the fixing up.  Several of the power outlets were bare wire, open boxes.  Some live, some not.  There may have been a foundation crack as there was a crack running most of the driveway into the garage and you could feel an uneven floor in the kitchen despite the tile that was laid over it.  The roof leaked, as did the bathroom, the bathroom being renovated after we had moved in.  I'll tell you, taking a shower in late winter with a partially missing bathroom wall makes for QUICK showers to get the hell back into the warmer house.  There were chain-link fences between us and the neighbors with both our left and right not even having the privacy slats in the fencing.  You could see everything our neighbors were doing, even when that meant the neighbors to our right were sunbathing or running naked from the kitchen door to their garage because she was doing laundry and literally had nothing clean to wear, or the neighbors to our left who would dig a hole in the backyard and dump their motor oil after changing it.  These were the same neighbors where their son's friend just decided to smash dad's back window out of the minivan just because he felt like it.  Oh, the shitstorm their dad gave that kid when he found out what had happened. 
But despite all of that, we actually turned that house into a home for the time we lived there.  

But it was even before we moved in that I took first notice of unexplained activity.  And it started with my bedroom.  We knew for a while when we were going to move from the rental to our new place so unlike previous moves, we had plenty of time to prep the house and start transitioning over from one to the other.  So I took advantage of this time to set up my bedroom before the move and make better use of the space.  I installed one of those wire closet organizers.  That helped a lot since I was scaling down to a smaller bedroom and smaller closet.  Maximize the use of space.  And I also bought a simple bookcase from Target.  You know the kind, the cheap particle board with the woodgrain decal in your choice of 'woodgrain' brown or dark brown/black.  I went with the 'woodgrain' and went into the house about a week before the big move to get those all set up.  It was just me in the place, all by my lonesome and listening to some music while I worked.  Didn't think anything about the random noises I heard in the other rooms since I just figured it was the house settling and since there wasn't anything else in the building, nothing to mute the echoing sounds.  No biggy.  
After I finished the bookcase, I went ahead and started to fill it with my books that I had mentioned previously.  The spiritual reading, shamanism and books on the occult.  Mind you, this point in my life I was also EXTREMELY anal retentive about my organization.  While I didn't always organize everything alphabetically...  well, I DID do that with my VHS collection.  Gah, late 90s of course I owned a small library of say, 50 VHS movies on an organizer.  But I didn't bring that over/set it up, just the bookcase and books.  But the books (and movies), I would always organize so they faced the same direction.  In that, you can read them Left to right, top to bottom.  Everything 'faced' the same direction so the book's spines, you could read at a glance.  

I finished up, locked up the house and left.  I wouldn't be back until the Big Move.  In fact, nobody was back in the house until the Big Move Day.  There were only 3 keys and I had one, my brother and our dad accounted for all 3.  Nobody was in the house from the time I finished working there until I moved the mattress into my bedroom a week later.  And it was as soon as I dropped the mattress on the floor and stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath that I noticed something was amiss.  From that laying position, I looked over at the bookcase and two of the books were facing the opposite direction.  Upside down for lack of a better word.  I know I would never have put them there like that and like I said, no one had been in the house since I was there last.  Who could have touched them much less moved them and then put them back exactly where I left them but facing the wrong way?  The books? 
A Dictionary of Angels and Demons
The Encyclopedia of the Supernatural  

Having lived with the entities in The Garage and then Fred and Wilma at the Mountain Top, I honestly didn't think much of this latest in a lifetime of unexplainable and genuinely didn't think about it again until hours later when I asked dad if he had been to the house since I was last there.  Of course he hadn't.  And of course my brother hadn't.  Yet, there it was.  And it was truly only the first of many small, very subtle activity in that house.  The next significant event didn't take place until a few years later and it was when it was just dad and I.  

My sister had a medical procedure done in Tijuana, because stateside doctors can often never find anything wrong or their process takes too long that people often opt for medical care outside of the country.  Medical "vacations" are a thing if you weren't aware.  Anyway, my sister was at a hospital in TJ and mom was there by her side as always.  So back at home it was dad and I.  He was laying on his bed, doors open leading to the living room and I was in the living room, facing the TV, my back to him.  He made a rustling noise like he was sitting up so I looked back at him and in that instant, he asked me, "Did you smell that?!"  
"No, what?"  
At this point, dad had already had surgery to remove his lower intestine, ulcerative colitis, so he had an ostomy appliance attached to his hip.  I mention this because some of you might be thinking dad farted and as a joke wanted me to breathe it in.  He couldn't pass gas that way anymore so no.  I didn't smell anything.  
He took a few seconds to compose himself and said, 
"I just smelled flowers.  The most incredible smelling flowers like someone had just walked past me with a bundle of them." 
"No, I didn't smell anything." and part of me was wondering how that could be.  After a couple of minutes of just sitting there facing one another hoping to smell it, me for the first time, him a second time, we both just went back to watching our separate TVs.  Him laying back down, me turning back to the living room.  Then it hit me.  

To this day, I can't fully describe properly what it was I caught the aroma of.  It was distinctly floral, almost like a rose.  But even a rose didn't smell as sweet.  It swept past me and I caught a whiff of it, just enough to register and then when I went back to breathe it in deeper, it was gone.  I swiped my head back and forth, leaning forward, stretching my neck out further and further to catch that aroma once again but it was gone.  I looked back at my dad who was sitting up on his bed again and he just smiled at me and said, 
"There it was again."  

I'm sure if you're even passingly familiar with the unexplained, the term Clairvoyant or even Clairaudient should sound familiar.  The ability to "see" or "hear" that which isn't there.  Mediums OFTEN claim to be Clairvoyant, even when they're not.  But I so rarely ever hear about the other Clair- abilities.  And I had never even heard of the term; Clairalience.  The ability to smell something which isn't there.  Yet, that seems to be what I've experienced.  In fact, both my dad and I experienced the same thing at the same time.  And if that doesn't do it for you, I'll do you one better.  We weren't the only two to smell those flowers at the time.  

Down in that Tijuana hospital as my sister was recovering from her surgery, and mind you, MANY of the hospitals in Mexico are run by churches.  And this one was no different, with the nurses actually being nuns associated with the church.  But in that hospital bed, my sister with mom sitting at her side, she asked mom what kind of incense the nuns were lighting in the hospital.  
"They don't burn incense here, it's a hospital."  

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