When we lived in Fountain Bleu, a trailer park located in Conklin, NY, my younger sister and I spent most of our days playing outdoors. Running through the sprinkler, catching lightning bugs, and rolling on our sides down the hill in our yard kept us too busy to sit like statues in front of a television set. I remember us staying outside well after dark and often begging our parents to stay out just a few minutes longer.
Few things interfered with the energy of a six year old. But some things could. Like the flu. When the fever and chills caught up to me all I wanted to do was sleep, sleep, and sleep some more.
It was sometime after I fell asleep and my mom went to bed that I heard the humming. A melody I'd never heard before. Weak and tired, I glanced to my sister. Because my mother always kept the hall light on it was easy to see that my sister was tucked under her covers fast asleep.
At this, I closed my eyes.
But the humming didn't go away. It grew louder, joined by the scent of what to me smelled like freshly baked sugar cookies.
At the time, anything having to do with food should of turned my stomach, but it didn't. Instead, the knots in my stomach started to relax. The air around seemed cooler, lighter, easier for me to breathe.
That's when I knew without looking someone was there. Again, I opened my eyes. Not out of fear, but curiosity.
If this had been a horror novel, or a fictional ghost story I might have screamed at this point. At the very least, logic dictates that I should have jumped, or called for my parents.
Yet, in my feverish state at the time, finding a woman in a red nightgown leisurely rocking in a wooden chair next to me seemed completely normal.
I felt like I knew her, though I couldn't say where. Wisps of dark gray hair dangled against her face, refusing to stay captured in the tight bun atop her head. Thick, white eyelet lace trimmed her gown's front and cuffs. As she rocked, her fingers -- pale, long and slender -- scooped something into a cloth canvas at her lap.
It wasn't possible for her and the chair to have been there. That side of my bed rested against a dark paneled wall. It and a doorway separated our room from the hallway. Both of these things were missing. At least it seemed so until the woman rocked forward and I saw the doorway through her.
The woman stopped rocking as I opened my mouth. She stared at me, smiling. Then placed her work on her lap and, while giving my leg a reassuring pat, she said somewhat above a whisper,
"Shhh. You are safe, little one. Almost over. Go back to sleep."
She picked up her canvas and resumed rocking. My eyes grew heavy at her humming. No matter how I fought it, I drifted off to sleep.
The next day I felt good enough to eat and watch cartoons. When I asked my mom why the woman was there last night, she looked puzzled and asked, "what woman?". I explained what I heard and saw. Mom chuckled and said it was just a dream. Probably brought on by my fever. There was no rocking chair and no woman humming. Most importantly, there is no such thing as ghosts.
I didn't believe her. I knew what I saw.
It's thirty years later. Sometimes I remember her gown as green, though the rest of my memory of her is clear. Was she a ghost, an angel, a figment of my imagination? All I can say is I saw her and I wasn't afraid. Felt comforted by her presence. As I think back on the moment, I still do.
My mother doesn't remember me telling her of a woman in a rocking chair, though my sister does. Both their views on ghosts being real changed when strange things started happening to them after I moved out in 1990.
But that's another story.
The scent of sugar cookies followed my sister and I throughout our childhood lives.
As for the humming...I'd never heard the humming before then and I haven't heard it since, but I still remember the tune.
(This is a true story and the first encounter that I remember.)
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