Run Off

Whenever people tell me that they've seen a ghost, I tend to put on my cautious face. Who goes around claiming to see ghosts? Iffy people, that's who.

I know, for example, DOZENS of ghost stories.

It was very early springtime, and the run-off from the melting snow coursed down my parents driveway and created an impromptu river across it and the surrounding fields. A sudden cold snap resulted in the newly formed "river" freezing overnight, and so my dad announced that he was going to wade through it in his rubber boots and break all the ice. I'm not sure WHY he had to do this - maybe this was a terribly important task. I'm not sure. (I asked - he was cleaning out the culvert.)

My youngest brother - 13 years younger than me and still just a child in this story - was my dad's normal assistant for important "work" like breaking ice, but he was sick on the couch with a fever and episodes of Ninja Turtles. My other brother was a teenager and a friend dropped in with a truck and a brand-new driver's license and the two boys went for a drive through the farmland and the bush surrounding my parents' house.

I announced at the outset that this was a ghost story, so you know that something is going to pop up someplace, that someone will be the center of the story - will it be the sick child, dreaming in feverish innocence of what is to come? will it be my dad, stomping through the ice in the field all alone? will it be my other brother, suddenly old enough for wild, seeming freedom?

My oldest brother returned later, and was concerned. Wasn't our little brother too sick to have been outside breaking ice all afternoon? Our little brother, the one who had spent the afternoon napping feverishly on the couch - but both teenage boys had seen a small child following close behind dad as they drove by a couple of times, a small child carefully walking in the big rubber-booted footprints dad was leaving in the broken ice. And my dad had a shivery, not-alone feeling as he broke the ice, all by himself in the big white field, water running and things thawing, unseen, under the white and the ice.

I'm not in this story. I've been told this story so many times - the sick sleeping child in the house, the boys in the truck, the silent ghost child walking right behind my dad - that I can picture it in my mind, but I was already grown up and gone. My childhood books were still on the shelves, my outgrown shoes still waited by the front door but I was someplace else, I was unseen.

My kids decided to rake up the front yard this weekend - well, someone has to - and I could hear them outside as they squabbled and worked and bossed each other around. Then their dad went outside to take them for a walk and their voices were high in the air for a moment and then they rounded the corner and were gone from my sight. And I shivered in the bright autumn light, shivered in the suddenly silent air as this empty promising ghost passed by, this shivering specter of childhood's inevitable end.