In 1868, and in front of an audience, notable psychic Daniel Douglas Home went into a trance and floated out of the third floor window of his house, eventually drifting into the empty field next door. No signs of fraud were ever found.
In 1976, I climbed on top of the picnic shelter at the park, opened an umbrella, and jumped. I had spent hours beforehand lecturing to my friends how the wind would lift me up off the roof, how I would float gently to the ground on the other side of the park. I, too, had an audience, and one girl said she saw me float a little bit right before I slammed into the ground.
In 1993, in the middle of the night, my sister drove her truck off the road and buried it nose-first in a culvert. Nobody was there to see it happen, but her dog was thrown out the open window, landed far enough away from the wreckage to count as flight.
First Couple
John Quincy Adams kept a pet alligator in one of the White House bathrooms,
reportedly there to terrify guests and staff.
The alligator did not have a name, and was just referred to as "The Alligator."
His wife, Louisa, kept a cluster of silkworms as pets inside the White House
and busied herself by harvesting their cocoons
and weaving the threads into handkerchiefs for guests.
No one knows if she named her silkworms or not, but she probably didn’t,
since they were all destined for death at her hands anyway.
Louisa wasn’t very good at weaving, but since she was the First Lady of the United States,
visiting dignitaries would accept her lumpy handkerchiefs
the way you would accept a hand-made Valentine from a small child that wasn’t your own,
covered with sticky bits, poor spelling, and good intentions.
Sometimes, she would forget to remove the last of the insect detritus from her creations,
which would consequently rot and grow into holes and disintegrate the thin silk.
One can only imagine how lonely she must have been,
with only her silkworms to keep her company, her husband
too busy wrestling with The Alligator and administering to affairs of state
to spend any quality time with her. Poor, beautiful Louisa,
patiently dropping one silkworm cocoon at a time into a cup of boiling tea,
watching the threads unravel like a cloud around the remains
of one former companion after another,
her determined denial of the moths
that should be been allowed to flutter off into the night.
Branta leucopsis (the Barnacle Goose)
It was once believed that Barnacle Geese hatched
from the barnacles growing on rotting timbers,
and that because they weren't born like regular birds,
it was okay to eat them during Lent
and other periods of fasting.
They supposedly tasted fantastic to medieval Europeans,
full of lovely grease and fat, which leads one to believe
that any great number of theories might have been concocted
just so that people could keep eating them,
even during religious holidays.
In his book, Herball (published in 1597), noted ornithologist John Gerard
claimed that the trees growing close to the shore along the Irish coast
were covered in large, red barnacles, that, when opened,
contained bird-like creatures, disputing the claim made nearly fifty years before
by another ornithologist, William Turner,
that it was actually the fungi growing on the rotting timbers
that turned into these birds, and not the barnacles.
An Irishman he'd encountered, named Octavian,
was said to have handled the half-formed birds,
mashing them in his great, brown, fisherman hands
as they floundered between fungal and avian form.
The Audubon Society describes the barnacle goose
as “an attractive small goose,” has a recording of the bird’s call
on its web site, you can hear it for yourself.
There is no mention of its fungal origins
or even a nod to its possible gestation
inside the beak of a knobby barnacle
of the type found clustered tight
on the surface of rotten logs and faded beer cans
washed up on the Irish coast.
Midnight
He calls me in the middle of the night and wants to talk about serious things,
asks when I’m going to leave my husband, asks if that’s still the plan
says he has space for me in his house, this place I’ve never visited
halfway across the country. He says there’s plenty of room for me
I just have to come.
It would be so much easier to have this conversation if, instead of a person,
this voice was coming from a tiny man inside my phone receiver
perhaps sitting at a desk in a teeny-tiny chair, his hands cupped around his mouth
as he shouts these things into my gigantic ear.
Charade
We all participate in making the house look lived-in, not abandoned:
my husband keeps the snow up the walk shoveled in the winter
I check on the mail and have a special box for any letters and packages
another neighbor comes by to mow the lawn in the spring and summer.
Only a few of us know the house has been empty for years
not officially abandoned, but no one has lived there since my neighbor
went to the nursing home after her last bad fall.
We take turns wandering around her back yard, keeping up with the weeds
putting in new plants and hanging baskets of flowers
from the hook by the back door. Lights are turned on and off, pest control is called
her sister comes by to vacuum the living room and keep the counters free of dust.
Some days, the house has as many visitors
as it did when someone actually lived there.
There are nights when I am stretched out on the couch
when I swear I can hear someone trying to get into her house,
checking her windows, walking into the back yard.
On those nights, I put the leash on the dog and take her out
walk around to the side of the house to check for footprints
anything that shouldn’t be there.
I never see anything, but an empty house
is a hard secret to keep.
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