Yesterday a Ghost Wrote My Blog.

Yesterday was a bad day in my blogging world.

But let’s back up.  I must first interject that 92.6% of my blogging days are good.  As I’m sure you haven’t guessed–I have loved blogging these past three years on WordPress.  It’s often become as important as brushing teeth or flossing.

(Have you blogged today?  If not, you might get cavities!)

The bad blog days are rare.

Sometimes I jump out of bed so excited to blog that I can’t make it past meditation, yoga and breakfast.  That’s how fun it is.

Yesterday morning–even though a photo of a Holy Ham Raffle had been posted the previous night–about ten cemetery photos kept begging for publication from the current photos folder.  (You know how photos whimper:  Publish us!  Publish us!  You can hardly resist…)

Wing

How I loved those cemetery pictures!  I went on a Search for Color with the camera Sunday before a baby shower.  Was there any color to be found along Lake Superior shores?   No?  No? C’mon, color, where are you hiding?  Must we resign ourselves to gray skies and white snow for six more months?

And there it was–the only color in the entire country–hiding among the gravestones at the Pequaming Cemetery.

Of course, they were only plastic flowers.

But to a color-starved eye, they looked like Manna from Heaven.  I adored plastic for the first time in my life.  I wanted to kneel before them, tenderly photograph them, sing songs of life and adoration to those plastic flowers.

(Our eyes will be even more color-starved come February, but by then the plastic flowers shall be covered by a foot of snow.  And I will hopefully be somewhere to possible view REAL flowers, but that’s another story…)

Let’s return to yesterday morning.  I dusted off the cemetery photos, color-contrasted them a tad, and placed them in a brand-new blog.

Began to hum a song, “You never send me flowers any more…”

That was obviously the perfect title for yesterday’s blog.

Same cemetery; another autumn...

But I counted the flowers in the photos.  Way too many plastic flowers to utilize that headline.  These dead folks had been given a LOT of flowers.

The song kept playing in my head, nonetheless.

Suddenly, I remembered the mood at the cemetery Sunday.  Kind of sad, melancholy, deserted.  And then my creative mind fell into a dream–let’s call it a dream–of an old woman who had no immediate descendants, who lived alone, who knew that no one–no one–would put flowers on her grave.  Or maybe her great-nephew would.  For a year or two.  But soon she would be forgotten, forgotten…

I began to write her thoughts in the titles beneath the photos.  Felt her sorrow.  Felt how she never really completely grew comfortable with her loneliness.  How part of her spirit might be lonely still…part of it sitting in the cemetery next to a tree…wondering if someone might place a plastic flower on her abandoned grave.

(Sob!  Sob!  The poor lady…perhaps I should go over and discover her grave…if you could figure out which one it might be…)

I wrote the last headline and pushed “Publish” and went to brush the neglected teeth.

When suddenly I thought, “WHAT THE HECK DID I JUST WRITE?”

Leaves fill sunken grave

Ohmygoodness!

People are going to think things like:  A)  Kathy wants flowers,  B) she wants flowers on her grave when she dies,  C)  she likes plastic flowers or D)  she thinks we should put flowers on our loved one’s graves.

I looked back at my blog, askance.

What had I just written?

I have never liked plastic flowers until that moment of passion in the cemetery on Sunday. I once blithely and immaturely told my parents I might never put flowers on their graves.  (OK, in the next sentence I said because I would be too busy TALKING with them when they departed and would not create flower arrangements for bones.)  They could have words rather than flowers, right, Mom and Dad?

This blogging debacle about grave-side flowers was totally unacceptable.

I had obviously been blogging blind-sided by a lonely flower-starved ghost.

She had written the sentences under the photos.  It was her blog.

But I would have to live with it.

(These have usually been the “bad” blogging days.  When I write from a point of view which isn’t my usual point of view, and then I have to live with it.  And field comments about it.  Sigh.  The blogging world can be rough.)

It didn’t help when John commented:  Ok, most days you leave me feeling warm and fuzzy, but today YOU RIPPED MY HEART OUT! Go ahead; just throw it on the ground for some coyotes to just drag away. My tears are freezing to my cheeks. I feel beaten before the day even starts. OMG Kathy how could you do that!

My heart felt ripped out, too.

A ghost had stolen my blog and ripped out the heart of one of my readers, and I had to muster the courage to respond to comments about a delicate topic–flowers on graves.

Creaky gate opens to old cemetery

“You shouldn’t care what other people think,” I swear I heard another ghost whisper condescendingly.

“I just want to share the truth,” I snapped back. “The write–I mean right–impression.”

“What is truth?” the second ghost sighed.  “You humans are so obsessed with a point of view.”

Like most rational folks, I decided this conversation was going nowhere fast, and headed to work.

I tried to work at the school after all this drama, but honest-to-goodness, had to leave early.  Drove to town and ordered a deluxe personal-sized pizza with meat from the Holiday gas station (even though I don’t eat meat.  And never eat at a gas station.)  Came home and poured myself a glass of wine…no, no, no.  I did not pour a glass of wine.  Now a wino is trying to take over my blog.  Instead, I made some peanut-butter-chocolate-dessert-kind-of-treat, even though we  rarely eat this kind of sinful sweet.

Then the comments started coming in about how wonderful it is to have flowers on graves.  That got me thinking.  Maybe the ghost wrote my blog in order to expand my consciousness.  To give me the opposite viewpoint, to widen perspective.

Yes, that must be it.  She wants me some day to lay flowers–plastic or otherwise–on cemetery graves.  Perhaps even next summer, when I visit my grandma and grandpa’s headstones.  Perhaps they might appreciate some daisies or roses.  Grandpa always did like red roses…

Birds on wires

There is only one remedy when your blogging world falls apart.

You know what it is, right?

Of course!

Write another blog, explaining it all!  **grin**

P.S.  My daughter called in the afternoon.

“How is your day going?” she asked.

“Terrible,” I said, ” a ghost wrote my blog today.”

“OK,” she said in that long-suffering voice, but with a delightful hint of amusement, “OK.  And how else was your day?”

“Just fine,” I said with a cheeky smile, ” Just fine!”

P.S.S.  Those of you who don’t believe in ghosts–that’s perfectly OK.  Just substitute the phrase “Yesterday Creativity Wrote My Blog.”  That will definitely suffice.  (And the ghosts won’t mind.  They are used to not getting credit for their contributions.)