Author: madmuser

I am dazzled by the almost-blinding sparkle of snow as I walk my little dog on this late winter afternoon.  On our walk on this day, with the temperature hovering round 20 degrees, we are warmed by our brisk pace and the growing power of the sun’s rays. We are also encased in the glow of pure sunlight reflected off  pristine snow. It is simply put:  glorious.

Everywhere I go, people are complaining about this winter and wishing it away. They are yearning for the mild, mealy-mouth, wimpy winters of recent years, winters where I have yearned for the drama of a good old fashioned winter. This is it: a winter filled with winter. I am not wishing it away. .

I love these walks on days like this as well as the drama of a storm with its howling wind and swirling snow. I love curling up in cozy rooms with roaring fires,  snuggling on the couch with the dogs and lots of good books. I love getting my exercise by shoveling our driveway – sometimes two or three times in a single day!

Soon the maple syrup will be running and the sweet smell of it boiling will perfume the air. Soon the ice will go under in the Finger Lakes – swallowed up all at once into the depths as the cold water beneath emerges to the top. Soon the snow will melt from the lawns and gardens and the earth will have that rusty, vibrant smell that only fresh mud has and soon the geese will be moving, their honking a distant reminder that we’re moving from late winter to early spring.

I will love this, too. All the subtle nuances and smells and celebrations. I love them all – the seasons and all the in-betweens. And through them all I will walk my little dog.

Today I am obsessed with a developing story here in my town – about a body found in the backyard of a home in a VERY trendy area. Last night a news bulletin was issued for a “Suspicious Condition” which, understandably, alarmed neighbors as well as other city residents. Today, it was announced the home is owned by a psychiatrist and that the ‘condition’ was the discovery of a body in its backyard. The body has been identified as a young man who has been missing since October.

Let me come out of the closet now and admit to being morbid. I mean VERY morbid. I have been like this for my whole life. I obsess and must find and read every gory detail of every horrific event, but my ‘specialty’ is plane crashes and car wrecks. My family and a few select friends are well-aware of my propensity towards the morbid, but I try to keep  this unflattering character flaw under cloak.

Back to the body in the shrink’s backyard. The house is kind of creepy looking and the possibility of additional bodies has also been whispered. Already, the primo local psychiatric hospital has renounced the shrink as having anything but very ‘loose’ connections with their organization. Interesting.  So, I am obsessed. As another writer colleague and fellow morbid soul-friend said, she was not going to get much work done today.

Let it be known that I am a writer and here is an interesting fact about my work. I don’t frequently swim in the waters of fiction very often as it intimidates the heck out of me. But mind you, whenever I start to write fiction – (right now I am writing a novel that started out to be Thelma and Louise meets One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest but has quite purposefully morphed into One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest meets Dracula), it goes  from funny and light to ghostly and supernatural all by itself!

There is a message here.

Duh …

Move over, Anne Rice!!

I have recently connected with people I knew when I was five and six  years old from a place called Camp St. Joseph.  It was in the Catskill Mountains near a town called Monticello and it carries some of the most magical, and haunting, memories of my childhood.

St. Joe’s was run by Dominican nuns and as one so young,  I lived in fear of the old-school Catholic rituals that accompanied summer fun.  At that stage in my life, nuns terrified me: I was convinced that they never went to the bathroom, something I probably got from their floor-to-head habits  and rosary beads tied around their waists. With all of that encasing them, how could they possibly deal with a toilet? Each day began with a brief service in our own on-site chapel, with a full-blown, often including incense, Mass on Sundays. Our homes were quaint little red and white cabins, six or seven girls to a cabin, with a resident nun to keep things copacetic.

And so now, fifty years later,  there are two special things about St. Joe’s that have especially haunted my dreams, and they are both about a place.  But for now, I’ll talk about just one: The Grotto.

For an impressionable six-year-old, The Grotto was a magnificent, but very scary, place. It was Carved into the side of a hill, it housed a statue of Our Lady along with other relics, carvings in Latin, and a gated area where visitors lit votive candles in memory of loved ones passed on.  We had many special ceremonies there, singing chorus after chorus of the  hymn “Immaculate Mary,”  while we marched in procession feeling awe and fear that only the Catholic church could instill in young children.

The camp is long gone, burned down to make way for homes, golf courses, and country clubs, but for all these years, I have  wondered if anything remained, in particular, The Grotto. And so, just this past week, one of the former boys campers (the boys camp was on the opposite side of the lake from the girl’s camp) returned from a nostalgia trip to the land where the camp once stood, and of course, he looked for The Grotto. This is what he found:

(Photos courtesy of Bob Furia)