Haunts

My sister sent me this link.  She recently made a trip to the small town where my father was born.  A significant number (+20) of one branch of the Mama family are buried in that cemetery.

Nunica Cemetery is "active".

CROCKERY TOWNSHIP — Amberrose Hammond was walking in Nunica Cemetery one summer night in 2001 when she felt her left hand grow cold. Really cold.

A friend with whom she was on a ghost hunt pulled out a temperature gauge and took an ambient air reading around Hammond’s hand. In the late summer, 70 degree weather, the gauge registered 20 degrees.

Crockery Township was named for the prevalence of Native American pottery shards on the banks of Crockery Creek where it joins the Grand River.   Folk lore has it that the earlier settlers simply extended the native burial grounds and called it Nunica Cemetery.

I have too much living to do to worry about disembodied ghosts.  The ghosts I care about are the ones carried in the minds of the living; scars caused by a careless, hurtful word. Unfinished business.  Most of the time the painful memories become encysted in fibrous sheaths, guarding our tender selves from the sharp edges and points.  But sometimes the memories refuse to stay sheathed and cut and slash and injure.  Often, those memories are unsheathed by events that are echoes of earlier, careless event.  Talons flailed by restless ghosts.

I am respectful of ghosts.  I attempt to leave people on civil, if not cordial terms.  While I am not always successful I believe it gives ghosts less incentive to unsheath their talons. 

And I am busy living my life.