In a year and place he never imagined, he woke up in a cottage in Sweden. Jet lag will do that to you. It was the day after Midsummer, and the weather was beautiful. His wife was still asleep as he poured a cup of coffee, tried to clear his head, and walked out onto the adjoining dock to survey his new surroundings.
The cottage was on the shores of the Baltic. The water was calm and smooth and reminded him of a lake in New Hampshire where he had spent summers with his family. There was little island a hundred meters across a channel from the cottage. Birch trees covered the island and marsh grass skirted its edges. As he sipped his coffee and looked around, he heard a runner huffing and puffing and realized there was a jogging path over there obscured by the tall grass.
And then he saw something he literally couldn’t believe. His mother was walking on the island path. She was wearing her familiar blue raincoat and sweatpants like she did so many times before in New Hampshire. She was ambling along happily, her white hair flowing out from under some kind of cap.
But what made the sight so incredible was that his mother had died seven years earlier.
So there he stood, stunned, in the brilliant summer morning sunlight watching this apparition but not knowing what to believe. The old woman looked exactly like his mother as she strolled along. The body shape, the way she walked, the clothes, the image looked like his mother to a T. Only the face was uncertain, obscured just so slightly by the distance. Just as it would be that far off, along a lake in New Hampshire, USA.
He was astonished. It was unsettling. Was someone playing a joke on him? But, who could orchestrate a joke like that? he stood there alone. It can’t be a ghost, it’s broad daylight, he thought (as if that were rational).
It became even more amazing when an elderly man, who looked like his father came hurrying along and caught up to his “mother”. His actual father was still alive back in Massachusetts.
He couldn’t understand it, but dismissed the supernatural. Still, it was uncanny.
All he could do was sip his coffee, and watch his mother and father stroll along until the were out of sight, amidst the birch trees, on the shores of the Baltic.
copyright 2017 Christopher Donahue