I could talk about Hurricane Sandy and how we spent the two days that we couldn’t leave the house, but I will tell you instead about the dream I had as the storm began overhead on Sunday night because it involves an enormous bear penis.

So.

In my dream, the Hawk of Achill is circling above our town, except it doesn’t look like our town.  It is a lush, green landscape as found in the Maritimes or Ireland, and the town is in a valley, surrounded by verdant hills.  The hawk is enormous.  At one point he lands outside our kitchen window and each flame-coloured feather is the size of a small bush.  I seem to be the only person in town who is concerned that the hawk keeps circling over the school playground, and the explanation everyone has for this behaviour is that there is a bronze mouse statue — about six feet in length — that has been placed on the playground.  The Hawk of Achill thinks this is a real mouse and is therefore circling, but I’m terrified he’s going to carry off one of the kids who is climbing on the statue or playing near it.

As I’m watching the hawk circle, he descends several feet above the school and transforms into an enormous, floating bear.  And this bear whips out his enormous bear penis and urinates on the town.  It is mostly hitting the trees and hills, but all the residents around me agree that the hawk, in the form of a bear with an enormous penis, releases the contents of his bladder on the school playground and our children frequently.

Still, I seem to be the only person who is concerned.

Then the dream switches and I am hanging out with Zora Neal Hurston, and she is teaching me how to make a chocolate pie called Sister’s Pie which her sister taught her how to make.  And… that’s pretty much all I remember.

Freud?

*******

A 2012 Creme de la Creme update: we now have 95 entries on the list.  We’re trucking towards that December 15th hard deadline of being on the list.

For everyone who has already submitted early, thank you.  For everyone who has already blogged about it or tweeted about it or Facebooked about it or Pinterested it or Google+ed it or emailed about it… THANK YOU.

For everyone who hasn’t submitted a post from 2012 yet, what are you waiting for?  Take some time this weekend to skim your archives and then carefully read this post and learn how to get on the list.   I want every single person in the community on it.

*******

Eleven years ago, a friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer.  Her daughter had two guinea pigs, and the smell of the rodents made her sick after chemotherapy, so I offered to take them and I made them my classroom pet.  I taught middle school English, so classroom pets didn’t really fit into any lesson plans, but the kids loved them.  I had all of my desks in a circle, and we would close the door and allow the guinea pigs to run free.  They mostly sat in the center of the room, turning around to look at all the students.  And sometimes they’d walk up to a kid’s desk and the kid would hold the guinea pig in his or her lap for a bit during class.  These guinea pigs shat EVERYWHERE and the carpet in my classroom needed to be replaced by the end of the year.

I haven’t spoken to my friend in about four years.  I learned through a mutual friend that she died last week from the cancer that she started treatment for eleven years ago.  I wanted to tell a story about her, but it came out as a story about her guinea pigs instead.

Let me start over.

On the day that I learned that we were down to a few dollars in our savings account and I needed to find some job that could be done from home a few hours a week, I bumped into my friend in the dentist’s office.  Without even knowing how desperate I was for a job, she offered to hire me to do some work for her right there in the dentist’s waiting room.  I worked for her for about two years until I was fairly steady in my freelance writing work.  She literally took me from the first day when I realized we were in need until a little after the day we were standing on our own financially.  Because that’s the sort of person she was.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “An Accidental Gift” (By the Brooke)
• “To Mom or Not To Mom” (The Infertility Voice)
• “To Mom or Not To Mom” (Silent Sorority)
• “Proper to Grow Wise in” (Mrs. Spit)
• “50% of X Ends in Y” (Write Mind Open Heart)
• “Defcon 5 or Just a Little Off the Edges Please” (Expecting to be Expecting)
• “Get Your Bologna Out of My Vag” (Stupid Stork)
• “Recapping the #ALIMomSalon This Week” (The Infertility Voice)
• “Infertility and Extremes” (Too Many Fish to Fry)
• “The Business of Being in the Business” (Single Infertile Female)
• “Your Child Only Has 3 Months to Live” (Rasta Less Traveled)
• “What Would Cthulhu Do?” (Nuts in May)
• “Characters in Our Own Stories” (The Smartness)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Slaying, Blogging, Whatever has a sweet post about saving her son’s voice mails when she misses his phone call at work and playing them.  I was drawn into the post due to our shared feelings on e-reading, but it was the ending of the post that made me smile.

Serenity Now has a beautiful post about life after her D&E.  It’s about trying to find peace with the question of pursuing more treatments with the embryos she has on ice.  She writes, “And, if I’m being truthful, I am tired. Tired of putting my life on pause, wondering if we should plan for that trip next spring because maybe I’ll be pregnant and won’t be able to travel then. Tired of interrupting my running training programs because I need to slow my running down or stop running altogether, because my clinic tells me to “take it easy” during the 2ww. Tired of not being able to set long term running/career/life goals, because things might change if we end up pregnant and with a baby.”  It’s about not losing sight of the things she wants to do in addition to adding to her family.  To not placing one goal in front of all others.  Please go read the whole thing.

Lastly, Magpie Musing has a post about the far-reaching effects of endometriosis and Hilary Mantel’s decision to live child-free after infertility.  She quotes an article about Mantel pointing out that the decision doesn’t affect a single moment in time: “Of course, it follows that if you’re not a mother you’re not going to be a grandmother, but that’s not something you think of in your thirties. So the loss keeps changing its shape.”  I was so drawn to that turn of phrase: the loss keeps changing its shape.  Magpie brings together the article with an additional post and muses on the possible futures she hadn’t considered.

The roundup to the Roundup: The Hawk of Achill is urinating on my town with a giant bear penis.  Update on the 2012 Creme de la Creme.  Goodbye to my friend.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between October 26th and November 2nd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Nicole Smith, a researcher out of Indiana University, conducted a study that found — wait for it… — that infertility can affect your sex life.  It’s being reported as something along the lines of IVF can kill your libido and ruin your relationship, but the actual study seems to focus on the reason you’d be doing IVF (eg. infertility) vs. the procedure itself.

Now I know your jaw probably dropped open because this.did.not.occur.to.you.  Life crises often make us horny, and stressful situations such as cancer, unemployment, or the death of a loved one drive us to want CONSTANT sex.

Wait.

I may have messed that up.

Forgive me if I feel a bit sarcastic reading about this study and the subsequent headlines.  It seems like common sense to me; something that doesn’t need studying per se unless the result will be that people will stop saying things such as “well, at least you get to have a lot of sex!” when you tell them that you’re experiencing infertility.

The university reports,

Compared to a sample of healthy women, women undergoing IVF reported significantly less sexual desire, interest in sexual activity and satisfaction with their sexual relationship. They had more difficulty with orgasm and were more likely to report sexual problems such as vaginal pain and dryness. Similar to emotional and relationship challenges associated with assisted reproductive technologies, the sexual problems intensified as a couple’s use of ART proceeded.

I agree with the researchers that people should discuss their sexuality with their doctor since there are sometimes solutions to symptoms.  But the reality is that infertility is a life crisis, one that happens to be tied to sex.  If someone told you that their sex life was decimated due to cancer or unemployment or the death of a loved one, we would tell them that their libido will hopefully return when they are not in crisis.  We would not expect their relationship to look exactly as it looks when there isn’t a crisis on hand.  So I wonder if the good intentions of this study (and I believe there are good intentions here) creates even more pressure to treat a symptom (lack of libido) even as you’re not in control of the underlying cause (infertility).  And that, in turn, creates more stress and more frustration in regards to a person’s sexuality.  In other words, is this helpful or would it be better if we all just admitted that sex may not be an enjoyable experience during this particular life crisis for many people and we shouldn’t stress about fixing it while we in the middle of the storm.

I’d also want to see a study that looks at a sample of women who learned about their infertility after trying to conceive for a year vs. people who go into IVF knowing full well that they will need to use some form of assistance in order to conceive.  I have heard that the emotional outlook is different for the two groups with one looking at IVF with a disbelief of “how did I get here?” and the other looking at IVF with the relief of “thank G-d there are options.”  Not saying that the stress doesn’t become the same in the end, but how you reach the knowledge of your infertility may play into how you process your infertility.

One thing the study gets right though is their belief (and mine) that in talking about sex and infertility that we let people know that they’re not alone.

You are not alone.

If you have no desire to have sex because the act itself reminds you of what isn’t working, if you have no desire to have sex because hormones have made you feel decidedly uninterested in orgasms, if you have no desire to have sex because it feels like a requirement instead of an enjoyment — you have experienced what so many women experiencing infertility whisper from blog to blog.  It’s the rare person who is unaffected emotionally and physically from infertility, and the effects of infertility are far-reaching, even into your libido.

I don’t know if you can really treat these feelings, especially when you are in the moment.  I think they are something to focus on at a later point when you are not in crisis as part of the idea of resolving your infertility, which is the idea of mentally coming to terms with reality (and not, as people seem to think, reaching parenthood.  Children resolve childlessness.  We all need to do the hard work individually to resolve our infertility).  But I do think talking about sex is important, if only, as Smith states, to let people know that they’re not alone.

Okay, so not exactly London, but fairly close to it.  Leavesden in Watford Junction is the home of the Warner Brothers studio, and you can now tour the movie sets in a tour called the Making of Harry Potter.  They recommend leaving three hours for the visit.  We spent over seven and could have stayed longer.  Seriously.

We hoped a train from Euston Station to Watford Junction, and then took a shuttle to the studio.  I have to admit that I got very teary when we stepped out of the train station and saw that big purple bus that would take us to the set.  The shuttle takes about ten minutes or so.

I believe you need to purchase your tickets ahead of time (vs. buying them when you get there), and tickets are on a timed release.  We got there a little early and they allowed us to slip in with the group ahead of us.  After you walk past the cupboard under the stairs…

…and see a gorgeous quote from JK Rowling, you are ushered into a movie theater to watch a brief film.

Once the film is over, the screen snaps up AND YOU ARE LOOKING AT THE DOORS TO THE GREAT HALL (yes, I bawled).

While the Great Hall scenes in the first Harry Potter were filmed at Oxford at Christ Church, all the other films used this set.

You can walk the stone floor, learn how they made the enchanted ceiling, and see the house counters (which caused a bead shortage in the UK).

After the Great Hall, you move onto a series of sets and props housed inside a gigantic warehouse.  There are costumes and wigs.

And you learn that in order to give Harry Potter’s clothing a scruffy look while he’s in the woods, they used multiple copies of the same outfit, each one with a little extra dirt rubbed into the material.

You can see the gates of Hogwarts that the kids pass through when they arrive via carriage or go to Hogsmeade.

The leaky cauldron from the Leaky Cauldron:

And dozens of sets including the Gryffindor common room:

And the boy’s dormitory:

And Dumbledore’s office, which they’ve dissected a bit so you can get a better look at all his instruments and things such as the cabinet that holds all the memory vials.  Most of the sets have a dummy version of a character in place to give you a sense of size:

And just so you understand, this picture of the potions classroom is just a tiny bit of it.  The set stretches on to accommodate dozens of actors at the same time.

And the Burrow where you can see all the various props moving as they do in the film.

And Dolores Umbridge’s office at the Ministry:

And the Mirror of Erised and the big pendulum that swings in the front hall and just about every single prop that you see in the movie from Lupin’s traveling case to Moody’s many trunks to Ravenclaw’s diadem and all the portraits and Quidditch towers and the Pensieve and…

There’s a lot of stuff.  We probably spent about 3 hours alone in that warehouse room.  Just to give you a sense of the size, when the room is empty, you can fit several airplanes inside.

And wait!  Before you can travel onto the next section of the tour, you get to see cases filled with a lot of the smaller props as well as the Black family tapestry (which is really painted on canvas and made to look with trompe l’oeil as if it is sewn into fabric).  There is the Marauder’s Map:

And issues of the Quibbler:

And the letters Harry receives inviting him to Hogwarts:

And Lily’s letter to Sirius found in his home:

And edible treats:

And galleons, sickles, and knuts:

Before we left the warehouse room of sets, props, and costumes, we looked at some of the vehicles AND GOT TO RIDE A BROOMSTICK!

You wait in a 20-minute line and then are taken to the Ford Anglia (which we flew as a family) and directed by the cameraman in order to get our facial expressions to match what was projected on the green screen.  Then we put on Hogwarts robes, and we each got to ride a broomstick.  For an extra cost, we got to take home five photographs of the experience. (It’s the only place where you can’t film at the studio since the picture wouldn’t show up since the background is green screened in.)

We brought a bag lunch but purchased butterbeer at the outside cafe.  Mmmm… butterbeer.  The Wolvog was curious enough to actually try a few sips after I removed all the foam off of his (you know… the issue with white foods).

You are actually eating lunch in the backlot. (I don’t believe you can double back and go to the indoor cafe that is in the front lobby of the studio. So plan accordingly: you will either need to eat lunch outdoors, beforehand, or afterward.) The tables are surrounded by things that you can walk into or up to afterward including #4 Privet Drive:

The Knight Bus:

The destroyed Potter cottage in Godric Hollow:

Plus the Ford Anglia and Sirius’s motorbike and the enormous chess pieces.  And you can walk over the Hogwarts Bridge.

And then you go into the third piece of the tour which is sound, special effects, animals, and lighting.  You get to see Aunt Marge’s blown up body:

And bow to Buckbeak:

And hang out with a thestral:

And learn how they made Robbie Coltrane look so much larger than the kids (hint: it’s not just a camera trick).  There’s the Monster Book of Monsters and Hedwig and the mandrakes and a few films you can watch that show how they do some of the cool special effects.  The twins are no longer scared of seeing the dementors in the films now that they’ve seen the dementor puppets (which sort of look like ripped up toilet paper).

And then you turn the corner of the last room AND YOU ARE IN DIAGON ALLEY!

I cried quite a few times during the day because I was so overwhelmed and getting to walk up and down Diagon Alley (which was transformed with snow and different store fronts to be Hogsmeade in the movies) was one of those times.  I just remembered how I felt when we saw the first film and Harry stepped onto Diagon Alley; I involuntarily stood up in the theater for a moment because I was so surprised at how the image matched what was in my head.  And now I was walking on the actual stone floor, looking into the actual shops used in the film.  We spent over an hour just on Diagon Alley alone, examining all the tiny details in the store fronts such as Flourish and Blotts:

I really loved Flourish and Blotts.  Like really really loved it.  Like took probably 40 pictures of it.  They were featuring Lockhart’s books in the window.

And Wiseacre’s Wizarding Equipment:

And the Weasley twins’ joke shop:

At the top end, you can see the wall that you need to tap in order to get into Diagon Alley (the twins tapped it but disappointingly, nothing happened).  I took several hundred pictures in Diagon Alley alone of each of the store fronts.  It’s really an amazing place, and the lights continuously move from day time to night time to give you a sense of the way it was used at various times of day.  You can see literally every store and the outside of Gringotts in the alley.

Afterwards, you go into a lot of the art of film making: the blue prints of buildings, the sketches artists created before making the various creatures, the cardboard models.

Many years ago, I took a trip out to Figueres, Spain to see Dali’s crypt.  You get to it by walking through this darkened room filled with cases of jewelry he designed for Gala.  It is easy to see how much love Dali had for his wife as you walk through the room, and your mind sort of focuses on that love to the exclusion of everything else.  And then you turn a corner and there is Dali’s stone crypt with his name starkly chiseled into the side.  I remember having this physical reaction to the movement from love to death that occurs as you round the corner, feeling physically overwhelmed and weepy, and that is the only way to explain how it feels to move through the fifth part of the tour: the model of Hogwarts.

You go through a similar hall filled with glass cases of cardboard models, and you can feel the love the film makers had creating this world.  And then you turn the corner and you are staring at this ENORMOUS, detailed model of Hogwarts castle.  It was so overwhelming that the kids and I sat down and cried for a few minutes.  And then we walked the perimeter, talking with various interactors (the names for the people who are standing about and can answer all your questions) who pointed out windows in the castle, drawing your imagination back to various scenes.

I took a lot of pictures of the model, but I don’t want to show them to you because I want you to experience it as we experienced it: turning the corner and having no idea what we’re about to see or how it looks.

Finally, the tour wraps up in a room that contains over 4000 wands in boxes, one for every person who worked on the film.  They are all mixed up, in no particular order, and we spent a bit locating JK Rowling, Danielle Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson’s wands.  And then just perusing names and deciding which names we liked.

Oh, and then the tour really wraps up in the gift shop.  We got off easy.  The kids wanted the official book for the tour and we bought them each a Gryffindor patch that I’m sewing onto gold and maroon reading blankets (you know, to wrap around as you sit on the sofa in the winter and read the books).

So we spent a little over seven hours and could have easily stayed for an additional seven and still not really absorbed everything there.  It was easily one of our favourite parts of the trip.

Coming up: how to plan an Alice in Wonderland trip to Oxford.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t read My Visit to the Psychic (Part One) stop and back up. None of this will make sense unless you read the post before this one.

Sister P allowed me to write down the names of four people who had died that I would like to speak to through her. I took the tiniest scrap of paper from the back of my notebook and wrote in barely legible letters in a font that would put a size 8 to shame. But I didn’t just write in tiny print. I wrote the names transliterated into Hebrew (so, not their Hebrew names which would naturally be spelled with Hebrew letters, but their names in English shoved into Hebrew letters. Sort of a hard concept to convey to non-Jews, but go with me on this). Why? Because I’m not a natural believer. And if she had come out with the names, I would have simply thought that she had some device set up that allowed her to see over my shoulder. But I could assume that if I wrote out nonsense – in a foreign language, no less – and she came up with these names…

Well.

I folded up the paper as small as possible and handed the spit-ball-esque paper to Sister P.  She rubbed it between her fingers while she spoke and she wove my conversations with those four people through details from my past.

I was born too quickly. My mother is probably nodding if she’s reading this. I was born so quickly that my father didn’t have time to park the car. My mother came into the hospital and dilated to 10 cm within a matter of a few minutes. By the time my father got up to labour and delivery, he was told that he had missed the entire birth. Oh, and congratulations – you have a baby girl.

Sister P explained: I was born that quickly because I didn’t actually need to be here. I had made a completion in my last life and I had been released from the life cycle. I chose to return to earth and was born that quickly to slip into the world under what she called a “god sign.” She explained that I chose to return not for my own personal gain, but to help others. She said others would benefit because I had chosen to return to earth (aren’t y’all breathing a huge sigh of relief right now that I’m here?).

My uncle came forward to speak to me; the first person on my list. Sister P spoke for him. He wanted to apologize. He was sorry that he left so quickly without saying goodbye. He knew that I always had trouble with goodbyes and he was worried that it was because of the way he had died so suddenly. My uncle died of a heart attack when I was nine and he was the first person that I lost suddenly; without warning. I still have trouble with goodbyes at thirty-three*.

She told me about a relationship that I had during college. She told me I had dated the man for two years and our relationship was so intense that when she looked at our relationship as she peered into my past, she couldn’t tell what was him and what was me. His life had bled so completely into my own.

She told me there was a night after I got off the phone when I was crying so hard that I knelt down on the ground and started hitting the floor with the palm of my hand. And I did do this, alone in the apartment, my junior year. I never told anyone about it – including this boyfriend – until I told my sister this story after I left Sister P’s.

My cousin came forward to speak holding the left side of her head. She called herself not by the name I wrote down in transliterated Hebrew on the slip of paper, but the name that I called her. She told me that what had been in her head was now gone and I should stop mourning her because she was at peace. She died when I was in middle school from a brain tumour.

Sister P ran through a host of past problems and situations, ticking them off as proof, promising me that she had something extremely important to tell me about my future and she wanted me to believe her and take it to heart. She touched on a lost friendship, the end of my relationship with this aforementioned boyfriend, a difficult time in my family when I was 13. She told me that I needed to let go of what was happening in the moment, leave it behind in Massachusetts and move. She apologized for what I was going through in Massachusetts (as I’ve already said, I was in the center of Hell), but it was necessary for this whole return-to-earth business. “Believe it or not, you need to be going through this now so you can help people later.”

And though I don’t feel like I can speak openly about what happened in Massachusetts, I think what Sister P said is completely true. I don’t think you would have me connecting with you if not for that experience that brought something that started in college full-circle. But until I looked over my notes from Sister P tonight to write this post, I never put that together.

Not to be cryptic or anything.

My pushy Hungarian great-grandmother showed up for a visit and kept interrupting Sister P, just as she would have done in real life. She kept marveling at me and saying, “but she is just a little girl!” It is a phrase I always associate with her, the Hungarian lilt to her words: “leeeeetle geeeeerl.” My grandfather, always quiet and gentle in real life, stood next to her, saying nothing. Sister P asked if he had died recently. “This year,” I answered. He hadn’t learned how to communicate yet with the living, she explained.

This is the message that Sister P needed me to know. She said that I wasn’t put here for marriage. But I would have one and I would know he was my intended husband because he would mention that he had lived overseas when I met him. Prior to dating Josh, I dated a boy from Israel and I always wondered if he was the one. To be honest, I really didn’t want him to be the one. I wasn’t in love with him. But he had, of course, lived overseas. Still, it wasn’t something that was mentioned on the first date so I always wondered about it.

During our first date, Josh told me all about the year he spent living in Israel after college and his travels through Ireland. I went home and called my lady-when-waiting and my mother and told them both, “I met the man I’m going to marry.” And I did.

She told me to write this down. I would only have one child. It would happen when I was 30 and it would be a difficult birth as well as a difficult pregnancy. She said the complications would begin around 4 months, but if I followed my doctor’s orders, I would deliver a healthy baby. If I fought against my doctor’s orders, the baby wouldn’t live. She told me I would need to stop working towards the end.

When we were doing treatments the first time, I never believed I would be a mother, though the words I wrote down from Sister P brought me a modicum of peace at times. According to Sister P, I would have one child. She had been right about Josh and she had been right about not trying to live in Washington, D.C. proper (a long story of apartment waiting lists). Why couldn’t she be right about motherhood?

When I became pregnant with the twins, her words sent me into a panic. One child. I couldn’t even focus on the rest of the prophecy. All I could see were the words “one child.” It didn’t even occur to me that it was coming true when the hyperemesis kicked in (a difficult pregnancy is right) or when my doctor told me to stop working and I fought him, saying that I needed to finish off the school year. Their birth, as you now know, was difficult. They were IUGR and were born prematurely at 33 weeks. I didn’t do any of the emotional prep work Sister P told me to do. I was an emotional wreck after their birth. I was 30-years-old as promised.

But we broke the prophecy, right? Because she said there would be one child. Or did she say “one pregnancy” and I wrote down “one child”? It’s obviously important and it’s not one of those things I can check on after the fact. At the same time, it’s not really important. It’s all in what you want to believe.

She told me that I would want more children and I wouldn’t get them. I would have many children pass through my life but they wouldn’t be mine. They would be other women’s children, but I would affect their lives from afar.

*******

I have never been back to a psychic.  This was my one and only time.  I have no interest in going to a different psychic or trying to return to Sister P.  It was just something that fit into my life in that one moment in time.  And I believe it with my whole heart.  And I’m always skeptical of her words too, especially her one final prophecy that I don’t know yet if will come true.

* And that still seems to be true at 38.

I wrote about this many years ago, and in honour of a private discussion I just had about psychics as well as the fact that it is Halloween soon, I decided to re-run these posts from many years ago.  Also because I most likely won’t have power for a few days due to the Frankenstorm, so I might as well prep something to run if I can’t post.

A long time ago, my sister had a women’s group who got together once a month. The host chose the topic. One woman taught them how to invest money and another taught about quilting.

One host brought them all to a psychic, Sister P*.

I have to admit that I’m not that into psychics. I’m not 100% sure I would want to know my fate. If it was good, it would obviously bring great peace along the way. Or would it? Would I ever believe the next thing on the list even if all the ones before it came true? Beyond that, if it was terrible, I would probably laugh it off in the moment, but the words would stick with me forever. This happened for a friend who was so taken with the story I’m about to tell that she drove out to see Sister P who told her that she would struggle with money for the rest of her life and die without ever attaining the marriage or children she sought. At 36**, my friend was still single, still childless, and still struggling with money. Not every prophecy is something you want to know beforehand.

My name came up during my sister’s reading. When my sister sent her then-husband to the psychic for his reading, my name came up again. My sister asked if I would want to see Sister P next time I came out to visit her. I really wasn’t sure. On one hand, I didn’t want the information, but on the other, there was a psychic who was asking about me. Overall, I was in a pretty terrible place in life during that time and it was sort of like dangling a ticket out of Hell in front of my face and then asking, “do you really want it? It may get you back to earth. It may take you somewhere far worse.” Who wouldn’t want to know if they were doomed to remain in the same cycle forever?

I went to see the psychic.

Sister P lived on a psychic compound, a metaphysical church complete with graveyard and tiny cottages reminiscent of the gingerbread houses of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard except with less gingerbread and more faded wood. Rickety. Each cottage was one-and-a-half stories with a dilapidated porch. Sister P’s was covered with children’s toys. There were no children in sight. In fact, there were no people in sight at all. My sister took her dog with her to walk in the deserted graveyard.

I sat on the porch, shivering and wishing I had brought heavier clothes, when the door opened. Out walked a squat, greying, brown-haired woman with tight curls and glasses that gave her a look of perpetual surprise. Without speaking, she enveloped me in a hug and then simply said, “you came.”

She ushered me into the cottage, asking as she laughed to herself. “What was a nice Jewish girl like you doing at a Buddhist monastery this week?”

A few days before I left home to visit my sister, I had gone up to the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, Massachusetts, a few miles from my home. I went there probably once a week, either to sit at the pagoda and think or to speak with one of the nuns who was a friend of a friend. It’s still a place I always need to visit whenever we’re in Western Massachusetts.

I’m not usually pegged for Jewish. Latina, Middle Eastern, Italian… sure. I wear nothing that would mark me as Jewish – no religious jewelry, for instance. But I could roll with the idea that Sister P knew my heritage. My sister could have even put her up to that. But the Buddhist monastery was confusing because my sister didn’t know that I went up there at all. Only my friend Pete and the nuns knew about my visits to the Peace Pagoda.

Sister P had a lawn chair set up in the center of the room in front of a mahogany desk. She sat behind the desk and I sat down in the lawn chair. The room was packed with lawn ornaments. Hundreds and hundreds of cement lawn ornaments – on the floor, stacked on top of shelves, toppling over in piles. It was fairly dark in the room. Sister P asked me if I had brought any paper and asked me to take notes. She said she was going to go through some things in my past so I would believe her when she told me about things in my future.

And then she began.

to be continued…

*I googled her name and it came up immediately so I’ll leave it at Sister P.

**My friend is now 40, and we’re barely in touch, so I’m not sure if the prophecy has been broken or still seems true.