Just Like Crazy Aunt Alice

  I have been told by my aunt that I remind her a lot of crazy Aunt Alice. Aunt Alice was my paternal grandfather's mum, a woman of Irish ancestry from the filthy tenements of Port Glasgow,Scotland. People called her crazy, reminiscent of that crazy cat lady person the townsfolk sort of ignored or avoided. My family seems to like to speak in vague terms or just ignore information all together, so I am not fully sure why she was "crazy". And who wants to be told they are like a crazy, nearly ostracized, deceased relative?

To this day, no one can seem to tell me why I remind them of Crazy Aunt Alice. And why was she crazy, you may ask? All I can find out is that she had premonitions. Somehow, saints or people destined to be famous can have them and the Catholic Church makes them special, but a regular Catholic lady has them and she is nuts. But come to think of it, I must be nuts too, cause I have dreams as well. I recall as a child, visiting my grandma's home in my dreams. I viewed the scrubby dry hillside behind her yard of avocado trees, suddenly scraped up by a bulldozer, and a cherry tree in bloom. Weird, I thought, that hill doesn't have a cherry tree and the hill is intact. A few years later, I went to visit her and lo and behold, there were the claw marks from a bulldozer, freshly upturned dirt and a tiny cherry tree. Apparently the bulldozer had left minutes before my arrival.

My premonitions or whatever did not occur to my knowledge for many years, until I was in college. I had a dream where I was driving over a hill, past a logging road on the right, with a hill sloping downwards on the left, a barn and home, an apple orchard shrouded in mist. A few months later, I went to visit my boyfriend in Canada and we went for a drive along a desolate mountain road, a place I had never been, a place that was really a nowhere of a place. We rounded a bend and I gasped. I told him that after the logging road ahead we would see a barn. I explained everything in exact detail before we got there.

I also had a few silly premonitions where the event happened the next day. A sparrow hitting the cafeteria window and dying, and that exact thing happening like I had hit replay, as I approached the cafeteria for breakfast. My toilet overflowing with raw sewage, and a broken sewer emergency the next day.

I have had a few dreams that were so real that it was hard to differentiate them from reality. One was of my father dying, and it was so incredibly vivid and real that I could not shake the funk the next day. I called my mom to be sure my dream was not true, and she informed me that my dad had began the 17 hour drive to come visit me, but had turned back and gone home an hour into it, racked with anxiety. I cannot help but wonder if he, too, tapped into Crazy Aunt Alice and knew something was wrong; perhaps, had he driven, he'd have passed away. When my mom cautiously informed me he'd not make it, knowing I would be upset, I breathed a sigh of relief. Sure, he wasn't visiting, but he'd be home, under her watch safe and alive. Because you never know when a dream is a premonition until it comes true. I have to treat every nightmare with extra caution and fear, for the nightmare could be reality.