Background – My grandmother passed away in the late spring of 1983 and
it devastated my mother. She sank into a
zombie like stupor for the next six months that had us all wondering if this
was how she would remain. Happily
though, with the approach of the holidays, she began perking up again and
showing signs of hope. This hope
manifested itself in an obsessive need for my mom to decorate the house with
all things related to my grandmother.
She pulled out her photos, her paintings, her dishes, her “collectibles”,
and her artwork; my grandmother had begun crafting like a mad-woman in her old
age. She painted pictures and glued and
glittered just about anything that would cooperate. One such craft was a candle stick that she
had made out of two baby food jars glued together at their lids, then glued
again on either end to an upturned plate.
After a good thick coat of black spray paint, voila! you had yourself an
adorable candle stick. A large red
candle, some glitter (of course) and some holly made a stunning display. It was one of the really, really cute things
she had made in her last years and my mother was absolutely determined that it
would be the center-piece of her holiday tribute to my grandmother. The only problem was that she couldn't find
it.
She was able to enlist me and my older sister on her frantic
search of every crevice in the house that may be hiding her beloved candle
stick. We started at the very top,
tearing apart each and every closet and looking in every box under every bed,
ending in the storage space in the basement.
I had taken the left walk in cubby and my mom had taken the right (my
sister was pretending to “look” in the kitchen while eating left over chocolate
cake). After 20 minutes of looking we
still had found no sign of the treasured candle stick, and my mom and I began
to lose hope of finding it.
S.C.O.U.T. – I was now just noisily shuffling things around so that my
mom would believe I was just as passionate about finding her candle stick as
she was, but had really given up on this mission and was preparing to console
her when she finally reached the same conclusion. I had begun gently coaxing her in that
direction through the bare beams that separated the two cubbies, I could see
her moving around only a few feet from me, when my mom abruptly stopped and
stood frozen in the middle of her cubby.
“Mom, it’s
alright, we’ll find it next year” I said, thinking the reality of the situation
had finally settled in on her.
“Guenny,
come here” she said in a shaky voice.
Her tone was strange and haunting; it stood the hair on the back of my
neck up and prickled my skin. The first
thing that popped into my head was that she had seen a mouse and was too scared
to move.
“I’m
coming. What’d you see? A mouse?”
I said, trying to head off any hysteria that may be mounting.
I stepped into the little cubby behind my mom and she looked
up at me from where she had been staring at her feet. I searched her face, now wondering what was
going on, this was no mouse. She had a
ghostly look in eyes. She slowly raised
her hand and held her finger up in front of me, and then pointed down,
“Look
what I found”. I looked down to the
floor and saw the second half of a black candle stick peeking out from under the
hem of her turquoise velour robe.
“Oh, you
found it!” I said with excitement. “How
did it get there?” I asked as the
strange location of the candle stick began to dawn on me.
“I have no
idea how it got there. It wasn't there a
moment ago” She said while searching my face for a reaction.
Needless to say, I was more than a little freaked out. At first I didn’t want to believe what she
was telling me, and looked for signs that I was about to be “had”, this surely "had" to be a joke, but my mother was dead serious.
We stood for a moment, long enough for the full weight of
event to settle in, and then my mother bent down and picked up the candle
stick. We gave each other a knowing
look, a promise of sorts, a look that made a silent pact between us that we
would always remember that this had
actually happened and wasn’t just a trick of the light. A look that said no matter how many years
past we would always have each other to confirm this moment, to confirm that my
grandmother wasn’t “gone” but was somewhere close by, watching over us and waiting
to see us again, and that she had somehow delivered the precious candle stick
that would soothe my mother’s aching heart. We never actually spoke of it again, but the
“look” was passed between us many times over the following years.
My mother is with my grandmother now, and someday I hope to
bring you all the “candle stick” stories that she has provided me with since
her passing, a few of them are real chillers.
I know I’m not alone and that there are many, many stories just like
this one floating around out there, in fact, I bet you have a few of your
own. Someday I hope to hear, and record,
them all for I find each and every one simply uncanny!
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