The Oaken Snuggery Part 18

Photos by Suzanne Currie

 THE OAKEN SNUGGERY - PART 18

BY TED CURRIE

     I have these strangely recurring dreams for most of my adult life. I find myself wandering about a graveyard for no apparent reason, always in anticipation of course, that I might find an inmate digging his or her way out of their respective graves. I suppose it’s also a minor fear that, like Ebeneezer Scrooge, from the pen of Charles Dickens in his story of “A Christmas Carol,” that I might find a tombstone with my own name inscribed. Wouldn’t that be a drag. I have never yet come upon my own grave in these vivid dreams, bordering on nightmares, but I have come face to face with the ghosts that we all assume dwell in these hallowed places, home field of the deceased. I’m not at all frightened of cemeteries, and my research partner Suzanne and I are frequent visitors of Muskoka sites, for purposes of historical research and a bit of ancestry sleuthing for her clients. Yet dreamland is another thing altogether, and my adventures within these cemeteries are of a Hollywood theme, that’s for sure, full of specters and assorted hobgoblins and bandy-legged wee beasties, apparently finding it comfortable to knock-about community final resting places.

     I bring this up because since arriving at this Rose Hill Bed and Breakfast, courtesy the Bosevelts, who restored the old farmhouse on this former South Muskoka homestead, I have been have an increased frequency of these dreams, but short of anything horrible or blood curdling. I found an old engraving published in a former school text, in a pile of magazines the Bosevelts have set out for guests, and it seemed hauntingly familiar, as if I had seen it before. It is very Victorian and quite unsettling in the right light, showing a wee lass being shown the tombstones of her ancestors, although she doesn’t appear overly enthused about the field trip. I have been wondering if my invigorated dreamscapes have had something to do with the two Victorian era lasses who I believe are haunting The Oaken Snuggery, playing with all our emotions here, who wish to enjoy Muskoka without the melancholy of sad antiquity. I have this cemetery based dream four times since I arrived here, and although I haven’t awoken even once, it having raised a bead of sweat on my brow, it has been affecting my sense of humor throughout the rest of the day. What if this is a message from God that my times is drawing nigh. Maybe my name will be inscribed on one of those granite slabs at the head of where I will rest in peace. I’m certainly not living in peace at this moment, wondering if there is some forewarning to these short but poignant dreams, or is it further evidence that two young ladies have managed to play silly ass with the subconscious me? I like to visit cemeteries but honestly, I do prefer being awake at the time.

     Painted by the dreamscape artist, I tumbled into the unconscious abyss of abstractions and fascinations, none of my own control, and what hand was this then, reaching for mine, such that I might hurriedly enter the Wonderland where Alice might have played with strange fictions. These appeared less and less as fiction, the further I travelled behind the girls along this winding garden path, with the aching sense of profound sadness as if attending a celebratory party with a fettering of unresolved sadness. I was dreaming but it wasn’t like any dream I have ever had in my sixty two years of learning from experience. I was being thrust into a story-line, the writer / historian being taken against his will, into a most mystifying spiraling of what was someone else’s reality, and not mine, except at the moment in time, when I had nodded-off on the bedstead. The further I became engaged the more compelled I was to look back, and I could see myself, head bent to the side, sitting in the armchair by the fire in the hearth. It was the same sensation as one would feel falling into deep water, and being able to see the sky and objects above with ever increasing distortion, as the sound also becomes muffled and ever weaker as one sinks deeper and deeper. I eventually couldn’t connect with my dreaming self, and could only look around and ahead of myself, as a matter of defense is that was even possible. Was I having a medical emergency? A stroke or seizure possibly?

     They were running hard and fast down the hillside pathway, their long white church-going dresses flapped like boat sails in the rush down one decline and up the next, through these farm fields greening-up in the strong spring sunshine. From a distance the sisters, Francis and Cynthia, ten and twelve years of age respectively, appeared as if two small clouds had suddenly broken away from the heavens, in the April sky, and were rambling along with feet and arms flailing, along the well trodden paths through the undulating pastureland. From a distance it appeared as if they might actually lift off from the earth to fly up into the azure sky, golden as angels in the bathing light of the afternoon sun. The children were coming home from a neighboring farmstead, where they had stopped to play and enjoy a noon-time lunch with friends, and being behind their time to arrive home, as demanded by their mother, were attempting to outrun time itself.

     The voyeur could hear them coming from quite a distance away, their laughing and yelling resounding through the valley where the pond was still and black, its reflective character reduced by the blaze of sun diving deep to its bottom plants, now feeling the jolt of the new warmer season of the rolling year. The wee lasses never seem to tire of their run along the weaving paths, at times Francis becoming the front-runner, while Cynthia had stopped momentarily to tie a lace, or pick up an interesting looking stick, a gnarled section of bough, broken away from a border hardwood. Soon the order would reverse, when Francis would become distracted by the sight of a deer poking through the cover of thick cedars, or at the sight of a rabbit racing from one bit of shrubbery to another in, as they say, the blink of an eye. They were neck and neck as they rounded the end of the pond, and nearing the straightaway leading right up to the farmstead; the one where I am currently, at this very moment in fact, residing, and this I can recognize from this elaborate daydream, of which these girls are now apart.

     As I watch this dream advance, like the reel of film off a projector, one of the girls takes a serious tumble, and the other, Francis, stops and looks back at her prone sister, having injured her knee, most likely on a rock obstruction breaking through the packed earth of the pathway. Cynthia is now crying, and Francis has knelt down beside her sister, pulling up the dress to see for herself if there is a serious cut or just a scrape from the rough ground. It is not a long hiatus before they are both on their feet again, and the run through the countryside with their musical laughter and shouting carries-on as if nothing of a serious nature had occurred. They arrive at the crest of this hill, only thirty or so yards from where I am positioned behind this window, and after stopping momentarily, when they both look toward me as if I am to acknowledge their arrival, they disappear off to the side, continuing their journey homeward some distance down the country lane to the east of the old house.

     Angela Collins has stirred me from my afternoon slumber, having put her hand on my shoulder, asking if I would like to share a pot of tea. I was shocked to see her standing above me, especially after what I had just dreamt about, and the fact she entered the scene, as if poetic theatre, just where one would have expected, considering that as a psychic hobbyist, she had already set the stage several days earlier, by confessing that when she and her husband had arrived at the Bed and Breakfast, that first night, she had seen the ghosts of the two sisters sitting on the hall couch, making it clear they were making The Oaken Snuggery their familiar haunt. Now here she was, standing, smiling at my side, at the perfect junction between the paranormal and reality. The dream I had, one of three since arriving at the Snuggery, had definitely been colored by something paranormal, because they were all way beyond what my unconscious, dreamland capabilities were, especially the fact each was as if a component of a larger story. Much as if chapters of a book. This latest dream vignette was leading me to some awareness but Angela Collins was the only person in this old farmhouse, turned Bed and Breakfast, who was going to be able to make sense of the details of the girls’ latest intervention upon this writer-in-residence. I agreed that it would be a wonderful respite to share a pot of tea and some insightful conversation with Angela. We had a lot to talk about, and their names, I understand by this latest revelation, were Francis and Cynthia, the ghosts who challenge normalcy and its decorum here at The Oaken Snuggery much to the Bosevelt’s chagrin. Their mischief had already caused some guests of the Bed and Breakfast to leave ahead of schedule, as ghostly encounters were not joyously received by unsuspecting urbanites looking for a quiet and gentle escape from their fetters. I wasn’t so fond of these girls either, but I was willing to hear their side of the story, as I am confident they were willing to share with Angela and I, what could only be a sad tale, based on the fact they are the ghosts of children, the reality they had never attained adulthood.

     Angela arrived with a pot of tea and a small tray with two china cups and saucers. As she bent over to set the tea pot on the table beside my chair, the tray, as if it had been pulled down on my side, let loose an avalanche of china, as the tea set slid off and crashed down upon the table, and narrowly missing the pot only inches to the left of the debris field. Not one piece was broken, cracked, chipped or in any other way, damaged during the tumble down to the table-top. Angela couldn’t believe her good fortune, and as Mrs. Bosevelt came racing around the corner from the kitchen, she had expected the worse, being of course, that her guest had fallen and been injured. The china wasn’t rare and could be replaced. A scalded and cut patron would be most unfortunate. Both women studied the china pieces trying to understand how they could have survived the impact with the table top, from at least a two foot drop from the silver tray in Mrs. Collin’s hands. Impossible, they both agreed, but indeed, the impossible had occurred. Or had it been an intentional bit of mischief inspired by wee Francis and Cynthia, who didn’t get invited to tea?

     In one of my dreams where I am wandering through a very old cemetery, I often come across curious creatures of the wild, and in my last visit three nights ago, I kept getting distracted by a clanging sound, as if a chain was being lightly swung like a pendulum, hitting a metal object, such as a fence post. I heard it, or dreamed I heard it, throughout the episode, and it really started to annoy me as I strolled the plots, and weaved through the old stones. I guess, with whatever free will a dreamer has to control a scene, I decided it was of considerable importance to find out what was making this noise. I came to an area of the cemetery where it was the loudest, and with stealth, I hid myself behind a rather tall rounded-top headstone, and slowly rose in order to peak over the top toward where the sound was emanating at that precise moment in dream time of course. It was then that I spotted a large white owl with a small silver chain in its beak, shaking it as if it was a snake, and was about to be eaten by the creature. The very end of the chain was hitting the body of the cemetery fence post on which it had come to roost. The full moon is fully visible to its right, just above its right wing. I awoke almost immediately after this visualization during one of these repeat dreams. The most unusual aspect of this, was that later that same day, I heard pretty much the same rattling of metal on metal, in my tiny room here at The Snuggery. When I searched for the source of this irritating sound, I found the Bosevelt’s cat had snuck into my room, and apparently found my own cross and chain that I had left on a chair seat, knocking it in play onto the floor, batting it repeatedly against a metal leg of my fold-up cot. It wasn’t an owl that for sure, but it did involve a chain, and a cross, and both items factor into this weird haunt owned by the Bosevelts. Was there a message here from the great beyond? It sure seems like it, and if it was a puzzle, in my mind, there are too many pieces for the remaining holes, so something is out of whack. Me thinks the girls are having a laugh at my expense.