We Are the Kind of People Who Make Watches Stop When We Wear Them

For as long as I can remember, my sister the ex-mayor's wife has never had the shine. Has not seemed to be aware of unexplained phenomena, hearing, seeing, or smelling things that are not physically there, or had electronic gewgaws go all haywire on her. I sometimes notice such occurrences, The Pony a little more than I, Genius not much at all, and Hick once in a year of blue moons.

Last Tuesday, I met Sis for breakfast so we could discuss a plan to de-content Mom's house, have it appraised, and notify buyers who have asked about it. No need to rush willy-nilly into the web of realtor commissions when we may be able to weave our own deal. Sis declared that the first order of business would be cleaning out the kitchen, pantry, and closets, to be followed by the bedrooms. I agreed, because I am an agreeable sort of older (though everybody thinks I'm younger) sister.

We spent about three hours taking up a table in Hardee's, next to some retired teachers who take up three tables every day. For longer. I can hardly wait to retire, if this is what Shangri-La lays ahead of me! Sorry, my best old ex-teaching buddy Mabel...I let Sis sit in YOUR seat! So anyway, we went back to T-Hoe, since I had picked up Sis on the way, and I started him up and buckled my seatbelt. "Oh, here. I almost forgot. I just saw it there by my cupholder." I handed Sis a check for a part of Mom's teacher retirement beneficiary money. They'll only cut a check to an individual, you know. No sharing. One person, one check. We had been looking for alternative methods of compensation, since I will be bearing the brunt of the tax hit on that money. But it's so darn hard to deal with stocks and CDs that Sis finally said, "Give me half of what you actually got, and we'll call it even.

Sis was stuffing that check into her purse as I backed out of the parking space. T-Hoe's radio cut out. Like, it went silent. No lights. No sound. It has done this before, so I assume there's a short somewhere. There's no rhyme nor reason to when this happens. It's not from hitting a bump, or turning up the air conditioner, or switching stations. It just goes off. After driving around for five or ten minutes, it automatically comes back on.

"What's going on! Are we going to burn up? Not only is your car dirty, but it's going to set me on fire with its faulty electrical system! And right after I finally got that check out of you, too!"

"It does this all the time. Well. Not all the time. About every three or four months, maybe. There's no pattern. But it comes back on." And it did, several miles down the road. I didn't think anything about it, but Sis was flabbergasted by this turn of events. I guess the power never goes off at her house. Come to think of it, the ex-mayor DOES work for an electric company!

That night, about 3:30 a.m., I woke up in the middle of a dream. Mom was texting me. As you can imagine, Mom never sent a text. Ever. She could barely understand her tiny phone enough to answer it, or to make a call. In fact, she was so behind-the-times on gadgets that her phone was before the age of flip phones. Uh huh. It was a little brick, as Genius used to refer to it. Mom had bypassed the age of flip phones, and the non-flippers were back in style again. But not Mom's kind. Anyhoo...dreams are often very different from real life, and in mine, Mom was texting me.

[I have been trying and trying to reach you. I am cleaning out your bedroom. Do you want this? Or this? What do you want me to do with this?]

And somehow, in my dream, I could see what she was holding up from my childhood bedroom. It was just a dream, no doubt spurred by that meeting with Sis to talk about what a chore it was going to be to clean out the house.

I told Sis about the dream yesterday, when were taking a break, her sitting on Mom's living room couch. The Pony told her his story of a bottle of soap flying off the side of the big triangle bathtub in my bathroom a few weeks ago, one night when he was running water for a bath. Which was the first I'd heard of it. Sis laughed and said it's all the animals Hick kills and buries on our property. She was kind of frowning, like she does, when she is joking, but has something serious to say.

"You know, last night, I fell asleep in the TV room." Let the record show that Sis has a room just devoted to the TV, with a cluster of furniture, and then another room, with its own furniture and a piano, through french doors, that must be her parlor sitting room living room.

"Me too. Then I couldn't get back to sleep in bed, because I was dreading coming out here to work on the house."

"Well, my TV was off. It does that if you don't change channels for a while. But there's always this logo or writing on it. I can't describe it. But it's not completely off. This time, it was black. Not a thing on the screen. No lights on it. I thought that was strange, but I wasn't worried. I got up to go to bed. On the way, I went through the kitchen and looked out into the garage. I never do that! But the garage door was open on the ex-mayor's side. I just figured he forgot to close it when he got home. So I closed it. Then I went back through the kitchen to go upstairs to bed, but I saw light in the TV room. THAT TV HAD COME BACK ON! It was playing. I don't know what's going on. That's really strange. These things don't happen to me."

Welcome to the club, Sis!

I'm sure it's nothing. Just coincidences and overactive imaginations. But kind of unusual.