mysterious

 I'm not a superstitious person, I don't believe in signs, I can see no reason why anyone from another world would have any desire to interact with me or this world. Hey, they are in paradise, right? But if that brings you comfort there is nothing wrong with believing that either. The last couple days I have been thinking about that because of a few incidents. Well, the truth is these incidents have been occurring regularly and I just laugh about them and move on. I live in an old house and so strange things happen. Doors pop open, small objects move around, I hear unexplained noises and what I can only describe as, oil spots, appear on paper left on my desk. But in the last two days it has been something different. 

 I'll try to explain. Now anyone that knows me or reads these blogs knows I like history. They also know I work on my family tree. I took them down when I was painting the room but I had almost an entire wall covered with photos of my ancestors. Over the years I searched the records and reconstructed a great deal of the past that had been lost to me. I discovered my grandparents , great grandparents and a host of others. Angels are a host aren't they? Well, from what I've discovered they weren't angels, but that is another story. Of particular interest to me was my maternal grandmother. You see Grandmother Clara passed away just a few days after giving birth to my father. As a result Dad never knew her, and rarely did he speak of that. I had heard her name, always in whispered tones, and how she had died so young. After my fathers' passing I inherited a bunch of his old photographs and mementos. There was his WW2 scrapbook, with pictures of airplanes and strange men in strange places. As a child Dad would show me those airplanes and tell of flying in them. He had a Felix the cat doll that had been his as a child and a Lionel train set. There were pictures of friends and old postcards. One of those postcards was written by Clara, my grandmother, to her father, who was away on business. And there was a picture of Clara herself, on the day she graduated grammar school. 

 My sister also received some items. She has his old toy, a cast iron blimp on wheels. Among other things she also had a picture of him, in his uniform, from the war. I remember that picture well as it sat on the shelf at our home for years. It was in an old wooden frame, one quite narrow with some delicate carving in it, just wavy lines that I think of as vines. There came a day when my sister decided to remove that picture from that frame. Her thought was to put it in a frame matching the others that held pictures of her husband and son, both in their uniforms. As she carefully removed the back she discovered another picture behind the cardboard. This picture was off a bride. There is some writing in the lower left hand corner that I haven't been able to decipher. A cryptic message? No, I'm thinking it was written there by the photographer to identify the picture, but that's just speculation. It remained a mystery to my sister. After my sister passed I was given that photograph and the old original frame. Dad's WW2 picture is hanging on the wall , in that matching frame. I have a copy of that as well. 

 Now it being a mystery about who the bride was I undertook to solve it. I compared that picture with pictures of my known ancestors. I studied the wedding dress and compared it to historical dresses. It appears to be in the 1920's fashion style. And then I took clues I had, along with conjecture. My father was raised by his grandmother, mother to Clara. Yes, Lucy raised my father and his older brother after her daughters passing. My grandfather, Elwood, remarried and had two sons with his second wife. It was from his grandmothers house that Dad left to go to war. I imagined her anguish and anxiety as both he and his brother were drafted into the service. Her own sisters' husband was off to war, heck the whole world was at war. I expect she had heard all the tales of the first world war. I'm certain she had heard the tales from her own fathers' time in the civil war, and the horrors of that conflict. I'm thinking when she was given that photograph of my father, he had always been her favorite, she placed it in that frame, with his mother, for safe keeping. Grandma Lucy was a deeply religious woman and read her Bible daily. I have her Bibles. Yes, I have decided the bride, as we came to call her, is Clara, my grandmother.

 So now Clara is in that old wooden frame sitting on top of my desk. The other day I found that picture and frame lying in the middle of the floor! I'm certain Morris the cat is responsible. The picture was just lying there, the back off the frame, the glass out of the frame unbroken. After the initial anger I felt for this picture having been knocked off the desk I was amazed the glass hadn't broken. The picture was quite a distance from that desk top, how had it managed to travel that far? Morris certainly didn't carry it. But I picked it all up and began to put it back together. That old cardboard backing had been held in place with thumbtacks. They are bright brass thumbtacks that I expect Grandmother Lucy put in there herself. or at least they had been returned there by my sister after she took out the picture of my father. That cardboard is very old and brittle but I managed to refasten it. I searched the floor for those thumbtacks, making sure I got them all. The next day my wife even vacuumed the floor. But here is where the superstition and signs thing enters the picture, no pun intended. Later that same day I spotted another one of those thumb tacks, right next to my chair, in a place where I couldn't have missed it. Well, maybe I did. Then the next day, two more appear. How could that be, I had crawled around on my hands and knee's looking for tacks and found none, the wife had vacuumed. And then this morning as I got up to get my second cup of coffee, there was another one, right next to me where I surely couldn't have missed it! Is grandmother Clara trying to tell me something? Or is it Great Grandmother Lucy? Of course it could be Dad or my sister. They would all know who the bride is, I'm certain of that. Personally I'm certain the Bride is Clara. But why would the picture be in the middle of the floor? Why do those thumb tacks keep appearing? What's the message? Well, I'm not a superstitious person, I don't believe in signs. Clara is back in her frame on top of the desk.