It's Going to Snow Soon
[First posted on the Daily Kos website on October 11, 2005 -- I have to say, looking back over this from 8 years in the future, I wasn't too far wrong in this. GM went bankrupt, and we had the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression since I wrote this. I hope that those events were *all* the bad things in the future that my aunt was foreshadowing.]
"It's going to snow soon."
I had a nice visit this past Saturday with my favorite Aunt. My Mom's sister is named Ann, but I always knew her as Keresthmama, which is 'Godmother' in Slovak. It was always nice to have a chat with her. What was odd about this conversation, however, was that Keresthmama died three years ago.
Now, I'm not one to believe in ghosts or to even have much faith in an afterlife. But this conversation hit me hard. Yeah, I was asleep on Saturday morning when the conversation occurred. I knew I was dreaming, and I know a bit about how the mind works. But I was curious, so I asked her why she had come. We sat in the kitchen of my mother's farmhouse in Ohio, and she looked at least 10 years younger than the 84 she was when she died. In the dream she was still old, but hale and smiling. She spoke as she had in life, with good syntax and a clarity she worked hard at, since she wanted to make herself understood through the strong Eastern European accent she had retained from her youth back in Czechoslovakia.