My First Memory

After the incident with Earl the other night, I started to think that the odd things that were happening were a series of connected events instead of just a coincidence. It was my first day off in a while and I decided to go to my hope chest and open up my old memory box that I thought would help me to connect the Chow-chow, "the face" , and the green squirrel. It was a small wooden box with two humming birds carved on it facing each other, holding a rose between them. The box was also carved all the way around and was very detailed. It took me a while to find the special key that went to the lock. In fact looking at the key you wouldn't think it did anything at all. The key was gold, flat and about an inch long with two prongs at the end. The key always used to remind me of a tiny crow bar.
I hadn't looked in this box for years but I was convinced that the things that were happening had to do with my past. I just didn't know how. I found the whole thing to be very frustrating mainly because I couldn't remember details from when I was young. As I opened the wooden lid, I spotted an old letter wrapped in a plastic sandwich bag. The Letter read on the outside "My Dearest Dreamcatcher" written in beautiful script. I slowly fingered the letter as I slipped it out of the plastic sleeve. I took a deep breath and started to read.

My Dearest Dreamcatcher,
You have a lifetime mission to fulfill. You have been called to greatness. This is a position of honor that has been a corner stone of our Legacy. I am proud of who you have become, but you are still young. How I wish that I could come with you. I believe in you. Please allow me to offer this word of advice: Remember each item that is put in your charge is precious and must be protected at all costs. Practice your talents each day, prepare for the day when the adversaries will find you (for it will come), and remember that we will be watching.
With all my devotion and love,
Otec

I stared at the letter for a moment as tears filled my eyes. I wiped the tears away and remembered a man with deep brown eyes wearing a blue robe. He was standing away from me as he threw what looked like a flaming hot white baseball at me. I felt a twinge of worry, but then felt a surge of brilliance and caught the ball as it came toward me. As I looked around, and realized I was standing in a grassy arena. I couldn't see the faces of anyone else but I knew I was being watched ...and tested. The man with the deep brown eyes gave me a look of encouragement and said, "Good deed my little dreamcatcher in training, now just one more." I giggled...
My doorbell rang and I was pulled back to my bedroom clutching the letter in my hands. I was a little annoyed as I walked to the front door. I was about to give the person at the door a piece of my mind for taking me away from such a great memory so I decided to take a deep breath before I opened the door. As I reached for the door handle with my right hand I saw the gold symbol on the glass ring flicker. Of all the things that I did not remember, this was not one of them. I remembered that when the ring flickered it meant someone sinister was near. I felt a shiver up my spine and did the only thing I could think of to do. I panicked.
I quickly grabbed my keys and ran the other way, out the side door through the garage. I got to the locked gate that would let me sneak to my car and hid. I couldn't remember the combination to the lock. "Oh crap", I thought. "okay just breath" I told myself. I remembered I had written a hint on the back of the lock to help me...in case I forgot the combo. As I reached up to turn the lock over, I heard the voice of Earl say, "Come on ...miss. open the door. surely you remember me." he hesitated then continued, "I just wanted to apologize for scaring you the other day."
When the door didn't open I could hear him getting irritated. His breathing got harder and harder. I got the feeling that any minute now he was going to put his fist through the door. "Open up you stinky dreamcatcher. I know it's you. I have been searching for you for decades."
I remembered the combination and fumbled a couple times as my heart was racing. I tried to stay quiet but Mugsy thought we were playing and kept rubbing up against my leg. I finally released the lock, open the gate, and peered out. The ring on my finger was turning hot white as I heard the bolt on my front door unlock.

Stranger Danger

I looked up at where "the face" had been as my heart stopped while holding my breath. The face was gone. I looked behind me at the gate that I had come through a couple seconds ago and saw a man staring at me. He was wearing a greenish city uniform with the name Earl embroidered on the upper left chest area. He was wearing a huge sun hat and a skull bandana around his neck that sparkled and glittered in the left-0ver sun.
"Excuse me" I muttered, unsure of whether he was someone I could trust.
"You're not supposed to be here...miss" he said. There was something in the way that he added the "miss" at the end that told me that he was speaking from a place of bitter authority. I decided to be as kind and get home as fast as I could.
"Oh sorry" I stuttered "I was just getting my dog back, she got loose from me when she saw a ...squirrel and took off down here."
"Uh huh" he commented, looking me up and down, trying to rip the half truth from my lips.
He finally smiled and nodded his head as if he decided to believe most of what I was saying.
"Well then you got your dog now so you better leave before I call them cops."
I gave a nervous laugh and pulled Mugsy back up the path. I didn't take my eyes off of Earl as we walked up the path. When I got on the other side of the fence I muttered an "I'm sorry" and thanked him for his time and patience. "Uh huh" was all he said.
As I walked back down to the sidewalk I could feel him staring at the back of my neck. I was anxious to be out of his sight line so I started to run back home even though it was a half mile away. As I ran, I could hear his first statement in my mind, "You're not supposed to be here yet." "Yet." He had said the word "yet." The second time he left that part out as if he was testing me to see if I heard him.. What exactly did he mean by "yet?" I thought about it all the way home as I tried to forget every detail of him. As I rounded the final corner Mugsy took off and pulled away from me. "Home!" I commanded. She obeyed and took off towards home. When I got there she was waiting for me to open the door, obviously glad to be home. So was I. As I walked inside and locked the door I heard Earl's voice. "You're not supposed to be here yet." I jumped and my heart skipped a beat. I knew the voice had to be in my head but my heart was telling me it was something more sinister. I ran to my room, quickly closing the door behind me As my breathing slowly calmed, my eyes fell on a blue glass ring with a tiny gold symbol in the middle of it in my open jewelry box. I hadn't worn this ring or even thought about it in...years. Two decades to be more precise. I slipped it on my right middle finger and decided to do a quick inspection of my small three bedroom house.

something in the air

Mugsy would not stop acting strangely as we walked. She refused to go, whimpering and pulling at her pink leash. I could ignore her pulling; there were occasions when she would pull at her leash because she was smelling something "important" in the grass and was not finished with it. But, I could not ignore the whimpering. My dog would bark at huge greyhounds but the moment the dog got closer and she could see that the dog was bigger than her, she would stop barking. It was usually very funny to watch. She was a lovable barking mutt, but I could not ignore her cries of concern. I knew that dogs usually had a keener sense of the things happening around them.
I looked forward towards the trail and decided to calm my puppy and go home.
As I leaned down to calm her and pick her up, I saw a flash of something that my heart recognized as...home. I thought I saw a dark shape running across the path, it reminded me of a squirrel except greenish. It was strange but, when I saw it I had a memory of a place that I felt I used to live. The place the colorful, like stepping into a beautiful landscape painting. I was standing in front of some older men in blue robes with caps on their heads. They were telling me that my time had come and that I needed to go through the door. I looked around and the door was a tree that was broken in half with a rainbow paving the entry.
I returned to the moment and picked mugsy up to let her know that she was okay and that if she did not want to go I would not make her.
I lied.
I took a couple of steps forward as she was calming down, I looked at her and she looked at me with her big brown eyes as if to say, "I love you, please let's go home." I apologized and we moved forward. With each step I could feel something in the air, something that was calling me back to the place 'it all started." What it was exactly, I did not know, I just knew that I felt like I had to go, I had to see it, the Katura tree, plus I wanted to make sure the green squirrel was just my imagination. I mean a green squirrel, that smacks of crazy right?
It was just a couple more minutes until I got to the location as I started to break into a run. I noticed how utterly out-of-shape I was a decided that the target zone wasn't going anywhere and I could walk fast instead. As, I got to the sign that read, "No trespassing" I found my heart beating faster. I had not idea why, this was no big deal. It was just a bunch a shrubs, broken logs, and one beautiful tree after all. I looked up to the top of the branches to see if I could see the "face" that I had seen before. My heart skipped a beat as I saw it again. The wind blew and the face moved with the wind. I smiled at the face and giggled under my breath as I told myself that I was being silly. I moved under the trespassing sign as a warm breeze came through. The breeze felt like a hot breath on my ear and I shrugged my shoulder to shake the weird feeling.
The face, I noticed was still there and I looked at it as I walked down the hill. I felt like a child that sees a shadow in their bedroom during the night and thinks it a ghost so they stay up all night staring at it, waiting to move.
I decided to try and talk to it just to prove to my imagination that it wasn't real.
"Hello, nice to see you here." I said
I waited a few seconds and then took my eyes off the face as I made a sigh of relief. Then I heard a voice say, "you're not supposed to be here yet."

and so it continues

Today was a beautiful spring day. it was 78 degrees outside and I was ready for a walk. I got my dog and grabbed her pink leash with the light pink hearts on it, so people would know she was a girl, and headed for the door. I don't know why but I started to think about the last time I had let my dog outside. My thoughts flooded to that dog that attacked Mugsy, which I later found out was a dog called a Chow-chow, a nice name for such an aggressive and giant dog. I realized that it had been several months since I had wanted to go outside with Mugsy at all. Today unfortunately, i knew that i had to "start somewhere" since mugsy was getting very pudgy for her little chihuahua/pug mix frame. Plus, I wasn't in the best shape of my life either so it was a beautiful day and it was time to get moving.
I started to walk up the usual way, up the street to the first main light about a quarter mile up the road then turn right and come back. The whole walk was usually a mile and took no more than 14 minutes. as I went to go toward the main stop light I stopped and thought about a place that i had not been to in years. The place was a doorway of sorts at least it felt like that to me. It was up the street a little and was the sight of an old drainage ditch. After years and years of water running through it, it had grown to be full of shrubs, flowers, herbs , weeds, dead broken logs, and one really beautiful and full Katsura tree whose leaves always reminded me of a heart.
I decided that I wanted to go see it even though it was gated off by the city and had a sign on it that read, "trespassers will be prosecuted." in my mind I had a right to go there and no city was going to stop me. I tugged at Mugsy to go left instead of right, she resisted for a moment but soon gave in and walked along side of me. Occasionally she would switch sides as she usually does in order to smell everything within her level.
About 15 minutes in to walk she started to whimper as we got closer to my memory area. I was determined to go since I kept getting lost in my own memories. I remember playing there with a young group of children that I was looking after. we were using it as our own imagination arena. We pretended to fight the goblins and monsters that were there as we flung spells and hid behind the broken log from our unseen attackers. I could remember how frightful and scary it had been when we heard a tree branch break on it's own while we silently listening waiting for the right moment to attack the imaginary goblins. That very real small moment of hearing the branch break caused us to wonder if there were more sinister, real forces at work as we hastily decided that it was time to go. the kids climbed up the small ravine first and as I looked back at the beautiful Katsura tree I would have sworn that I saw a face looking at me from beyond the leaves. I was both secretly scared and intrigued by that moment. Scared because of the feeling I got that the face I saw was really there and intrigued because the faced seemed to have been smiling as if to say, "i missed you."
I was torn from my memory as Mugsy started to forcefully pull backward and bark at something that was sending her into behavior that I had never seen before.

My first adventure

I sat all alone wondering when my husband would get home. It was 5 minutes before the 8 o'clock hour on the evening of the 30th and I was worried. He usually got home around 7pm so this was not good. I don't tend to over react, but tonight was different. Tonight I felt like there was something in the air. Like the air right before you realize that your cookies are about to burn. Something was different.
Suddenly, my dog jumped up and started barking. I got excited since usually my dog is able to hear my husband's car coming into the driveway, call it my own personal alarm, my dog knew 9 times out of 10 when my husband was home before I did.
As i ran to the door and quick thought entered my brain, "it's not him, don't open the door." I ignored it and opened the door. I ran out in the hopes that I would be able to surprise my husband before he could get out of his car. To my surprise he wasn't there. I was crestfallen and started back inside the house when I realized that my dog, mugsy-pugsy, was no where to be found. Mugsy, I called where did you go. As I walked around my car that was parked in the drive way, a big auburn colored, bear-like dog came into view. It had big black eyes and I started to think I know this dog, but I didn't know how I knew it. I immediately yelled for Mugsy to get inside the house as I stood transfixed by this bear-dog. Suddenly, the dog stopped, got this look in it's eye that said, "I am here for you" and started bolting toward me. I couldn't move until my Mugsy barked with her girly yelp and I came out of what ever power the bear-dogs eyes had me, and I headed for the house. Mugsy got in a moment before I shut the door. My right hand went the to dead bolt while my left hand stayed on the door, but just as I got my hand to the bolt the door started to open. I could feel a hateful force behind the door as my strength was being taxed. I started to panic a little as I wondered how a dog was forcing the door with such human strength. Dogs do not usually act like this, I knew that, but I couldn't figure out why this was happening.
As I tried to push the door closed my strength was losing against the unseen force. the door crept open little by little, bit by bit. I finally used my shoulder and my full body weight and with last tired shove I got the door to close. I locked the dead bolt and the gold chain at the top of the door and ran to the window to get a peek at my attacker. there was nothing.
As I looked out the window I didn't even see anything moving outside, it was as if the whole world was paused on t.v. or something. It was creepy. I shivered and went to my dog to comfort her and make sure that she was unharmed.
A moment later, as I was in the kitchen , the dead bolt unlocked itself and the door was only stopped by the gold chain that I had fashioned at the top of the door, just in case. I stopped breathing as I heard a voice say, "Tiffy let me in"
it was my husband, he was home and I could breath again.
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 I told my husband the next day about what had happened with the Chow-Chow (I looked up pictures on google.com until I found it's name) and he shrugged it off. He said I was worrying too much and told me that it was probably the strong wind that we had that night. Plus, he said "You know how our bedroom door always slams shut by itself when we turn on the air conditioner or the heater, it's probably just something like that...but backwards." He kissed me on the lips and told me he would make me some hot chocolate.