The Ghostening: The Conclusion

And now…the very-not-thrilling, definitely-embarrassing, totally disappointing conclusion

Originally published on facebook dot com.

“ALI. WHAT. IS. IT.”

My mouth dried out. How could I tell him? We had been wrong about so many things.

Firstly: No ghost here. It was actually a living thing.

Also, it was not alone. There were a bunch of these things in the yard. What differentiated this one from the many others was its strange proportions, and its placement. We had been very wrong about where it was standing.

It was not at the edge of the yard. It was IN the yard, less than 15 feet from where James was on the screen porch.

And it was not man-sized, it was actually about 12 feet tall.

And very skinny.

Spindly, even.

I had been right about water being the source of the glistening, but it was mere droplets of water, not a river.

As the reality set in, I was horrified. We had spent the last hour trying to focus on something we assumed was in the distance, when, in fact, we could have probably hit it with a rock from the damn window.

The shame was intense. It was so painfully clear now. How could we both have been so…so stupid?

“ALI.”

“I’m so sorry, Bubb…. It’s a damn tree. That ghost…is the top of a tree.”

“…What?”

James sounded both relieved and utterly disappointed.

I cleared my throat.

“Um…You know that weird little sapling in front of the lilac bushes, in front of my herb garden?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, apparently it’s one branch has grown like a foot and a half in the last two weeks and the leaves at the top are turning yellow?”

“…Wait, what?”

“Um, come inside.”

But he had already gone back into the entry room and was taking off his shoes. He turned off the light, and I heard him trudge up the stairs.

My brain, which had 3 minutes prior been incapable of imagining the shape as anything other than a ravenous man-eating spirit, was suddenly all business. As James came into the office I pointed out the window and said, “It looks like some of the top-most leaves are yellow, and from this view, right where the lawn ends happens to line up perfectly with the yellow leaves, so, in the dark, the top leaves are in high contrast against the woods, and the rest of the leaves are green and pretty much indistinguishable from yard.”

Again, we looked out the window, this time actually looking at the thing, rather than trying to look through it, to the edge of the woods. Now we understood the fuzzy-factor came from trying to distinguish a solid shape out of a single upright branch bedecked with foliage, and also that we had been focusing our eyes for distance, rather than mid-range.

“But look!” I said, “It is shimmering, though! There are dew drops on the leaves and they’re glistening in the ambient light from the street. Since the lilac bush is in front of it, it casts a shadow on most of the tree, so it’s just the top-most leaves that are catching any light. So, the glistening is real anyway.”

James nodded.

“Nature tricked us.”

I agreed. “Nature tricked us. But, still…Thank you for being willing to go outside in the dark and confront what we thought was a ghost.”

He shrugged, like it was no big thing.

We stayed at the window for another moment, both amazed at the sheer ridiculousness of how we had spent the last hour, and then left the office together and went into Sylvie’s room. We looked down at our sweetly sleeping child, who was blissfully ignorant of the fact that her parents, both in their 30’s, were evidently highly-suggestible, near-sighted dipshits.

We crossed the hall and crawled back into our own bed. It was now after 3:00 AM. There was no damn way we were going back to sleep anytime soon. We chatted about the science behind our experience, trying to convince ourselves we were practical, perfectly sane adults, and hadn’t recently suffered heart palpitations from staring too hard at a tree in the night-time. Still, the facts remained: We had been befuddled why as to why a viewing of our New Hampshire yard, complete with trees, did not elicit a Halloween-stereotype reaction from our overweight cat. When James had turned on the office light, I had expressed fear at the potential of being seen by a plant. I had, for fear of his life, forbade my husband from going outside to confront a baby tree.

I wondered out loud how the hell I was going to explain my hyper-dramatic Facebook status.

“Should I just post a picture of the sapling with the caption, ‘It was just this little fucker’?”

“No, I think you need to tell the story behind it.”

“Okay.”

We lay quietly for a few minutes.

“James?”

“Yeah?”

“We have a saw somewhere, right?”

I sensed him smile in the dark. “Yup. We sure do.”

“Cool.”

So. We might take down a ghost this weekend.