November

We had some nasty wet flurries a few minutes ago - the kids and I dashed outside because that first snowfall is pretty magical, even if snow itself is a chilly misery, but we rapidly dashed back inside because we were instantly soaked. Now I am cold.

By the standards of northern Ontario, my house is very old - it was built in 1900 or thereabouts, and it looks a bit like a cartoon of a haunted house, so I have been asked by a surprising number of people if it is haunted. Um, no? Scratch your average, reasonably rational looking person and we're all Medieval peasants underneath, with ghosts and witches and dank dark thoughts. Me too, of course - in fact, I am leading that parade, complete with pitchfork and lit torch.

Which is to say that although my house is not haunted, I know LOTS of ghost stories.

My grandmother, in her long and eventful life, was living outside of Chicago with her second husband and he was behind the house chopping firewood, I think, and she was in the kitchen doing dishes and she heard a familiar whistling and a familiar walk and someone rapped on her screen door with a cane and there was her father. Who had died the winter before.

"Tootie!" he said. "Get back home. Your mother needs you."

Her second husband - my grandfather - came walking around the house with a strange look on his face. "I just heard your father," he said.

So my grandmother flew back to northern Ontario, or took the train or drove - I don't know how she got back and there's no one I can ask - but she got home and her mother was a weeping nervous wreck because the local boys were howling beneath her windows at night, yelling her husband's name and phoning her at all hours and so my grandmother - who was a formidable woman - put a stop to it, of course.

When I was a child and my grandmother would tell me this story, I would think with shivery pleasure of being the Interesting Person who was visited by the ghost. And then I got older and learned a bit more about loss and yearning and the idea of standing at my sink on a warm summer evening and hearing someone familiar and who could never come back walking up my front path... well.

And now I have been married for years and years and I think about the miserable bereaved widow, old and alone and frightened, and I think about the gravestone a few miles from where I am right now. I think about the heavy feet walking on a sidewalk outside of Chicago, the cane sharply hitting the door, the voice telling my grandmother - now gone, herself, now never to come back - to go home, to help her mother.

And that makes me think of my own husband, quiet, hard-working, bemused.

Love me that much, I think.

Never leave me.