Visitation

Was this a hello from the other side?

Halloween night was ragingly windy, chilly, and drought-dry in Chicagoland. Gusts up to 40 miles per hour were blowing everything everywhere. But flying insects are mostly gone for the season and can’t handle wind like that anyway, blowing leaves don’t look like miniature comets, and none of my ordinarily pyromaniac-adjacent, yard-waste burning neighbors had bonfires going (in those conditions? thank God)!

So what explains that orb of light? I had just turned off the motion detecting light on the front porch to re-light the Jack’o’Lanterns so I could get the ritual yearly documentation photo of them. When I got back in the house, the notification dot from the doorbell camera was showing on my phone’s home screen. No surprise there, I had just been out there. But I have a habit of watching those videos anyway, even when I already know what’s on them.

But this time there was a surprise: that orb of light crossed from under the porch ceiling down across to the right, fizzling in to a misty streak, and then it disappeared (Roll your mouse over the image to play or rewind the video. The noise is just the wind):

Look, I’m a science believer. I look for rational explanations for stuff like this. I tried recreating the conditions to see if it wasn’t just some reflection of the across-the-street neighbor’s porch lights in the glass of my storm door.

Nope.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen something like this. The first Christmas without Mike, I went outside and stood in the street facing the house, to take the yearly documentation photo of the Christmas lights I had just finished putting up around the garland I hang on the porch each year.

When I looked at the photos later, there was an orb just like that, streaking across in front of the lighted garland, leaving a similar but brighter comet-tail behind it.

So the doorbell video will now be known as “Mike’s Halloween Hello.” I capture these images on holidays or during holiday seasons, but for all I know these orbs could be zipping around more frequently and I just don’t notice because I’m not out there documenting stuff in photos.

I don’t find this sort of thing spooky at all. In fact I find these occurrences oddly comforting. They feel protective, not menacing. God knows there are plenty of other things going on right now that feel much more immediately menacing than a little ball of light.

Sure, maybe they’re some kind of weird atmospheric phenomenon, like St. Elmo’s fire or something (I looked it up and wind can intensify St. Elmo’s fire on grounded objects, like a house or a tree) but it doesn’t seem that way. These orbs are white, not bluish-purpley like St. Elmo’s fire.

Or maybe it’s some sort of weird energy I generate when I’m feeling sentimental, or lonely, or when I’m missing Mike especially hard.

But the thing is, I wasn’t particularly upset either time this happened. Yes, I’ve had some crying time this October. I always miss Mike most in the fall, and October is his birth month, so I long for him to be here to enjoy the intense blue skies and autumn colors with me.

But this time I was just doing something that felt routine, sort of required. I regarded it more with a sense of duty than a spirit of invocation and or a need to conjure memory. But there it was.

So thanks for the Christmas Fly-by and the Halloween Hello, hon. Good to know you still come by every so often even when I’m feeling pretty OK. It’s one more gorgeous day today, so maybe I’ll take Angelic Daughter out for one last fall drive (got an email from one of the apple orchards we go to that says they’re open today for their last day of the season). And you can zip around the house and keep it safe for us when we get back.

Until then, I remain,

your paranormal-phenomenon-accepting, autumn-loving, geez-I-guess-it’s-time-to-disconnect-the-hoses-and-shut-off-the-water-to-the-outdoor-faucets,

Ridiculouswoman