Tale of the Unexplained

Easter morning! Spring is here, the flowers are blooming, the trees are budding and, outside it's, well, miserable. No matter where you are in the British Isles today it is either raining, hailing, snowing, sleeting or a combination of all of these accompanied by gale-force winds and sub-freezing temperatures. A quick peek at the weather map confirms that even our outposts in the Isle of Mann and Northern Ireland are not exempt. The Republic of Ireland, however, is somehow miraculously missing out on this apocalyptic weather. We can draw only one conclusion from this: God is proper pissed-off at the British.

Clearly, God hates the British

It could be over the way we handled the whole Paul McCartney – Heather Mills thing. If Jesus had been here, He would have just bitch-slapped them both, calmly explained to Heather that demanding half a million pounds from your ex so you can donate it to charity is not exactly the spirit of giving He is looking for and then assigned them some challenging missionary work, like street-preaching the gospel in Tehran. Or it might be the current brouhaha in Parliament over our anticipated Frankenstein-esque foray into animal-human cloning; it's not hard to see how God might be displeased with us for encroaching on His copyright.

Whatever our transgression, we're certainly feeling the wrath here. It's grey and wet and cold and windy and not at all like Easter. Also, it's snowing, but it isn't coming down in big, friendly flakes; instead, the wind is whipping tiny, hostile ice pellets that hit your skin like freezing needles. It's turning my thoughts from spring to mid-winter, that time of dark, leaden skies, long nights and tales of the unexplained told in hushed tones around a convivial fire. So pull up a space heater, grab a flagon of Oxbow cider, turn your attention from the howling wind outside and listen to my tale.

This is something I have been wanting to share for a while now, but couldn't imagine how to work it into a post, until . . . , well, you'll have to wait to find out.

One of the oddest things I discovered after moving here is that, when you drop something, it occasionally disappears. No, I'm serious. In the States, if something slipped from my fingers, I reached down and picked it up. Here, I look down, and it's nowhere to be seen.

This first happened when I dropped a coin. I scoured the room looking for it and eventually had to conclude it had slipped into a rend in the space-time continuum and gone into another dimension. Maybe it has to do with being so close to the Prime Meridian, or the fact that aliens always seem to land in England to make their crop circles, but whatever the reason, it happens regularly, if infrequently.

Over the years, I have lost a pair of reading glasses this way, as well as a pair of socks. In both cases, I was standing in the bedroom when the items slipped from my hands and simply disappeared. Prolonged searches turned up nothing and this past summer we even took all of the furniture out of the bedroom to paint the woodwork.

It is just now occurring to me that I also lost the coin in that same bedroom, so perhaps it isn't England in general, but my bedroom in particular that acts as a conduit to another astral plain. The more I think of it, the more it makes sense, especially in light of what happened this morning.

I was making the bed, as is my habit on Sunday morning, when I found a stray pillowcase stuffed between the mattress and the wall. It was not there the previous week and, given the fact that I turn the mattress once a month, I can be absolutely certain it wasn't anywhere near the bed three weeks ago. But it was there this morning, a pink and blue stripped pillow case that neither my wife nor I had ever seen before.

When I asked what we should do with it, my wife, ever practical, said, "Put it in the wash," but I have to wonder if I shouldn't send it to the crop-circle believers so they can run their spookometer over it. It was clearly dropped by someone on the other side of the space-time continuum; I hope they liked my socks.

Oh, gotta run! The wind has dropped and the snow is now coming down in big, friendly flakes. And it's sticking. I want to take my wife outside and show her how to make snow angels.