Mystical Confections

Sometimes in this life, you don’t know what is going to happen. But, you sure as hell know what is not going to happen. I do know that at the time, I had a huge list of what was not going to happen to me anymore, and it was growing by the day.

According to my childhood fantasies, I was supposed to be living on a beach somewhere by the time I reached adulthood. Any beach would have sufficed. My husband should have been making “millions” a year doing God knows what, and I was supposed to be raising our children on those “millions” in our house on the beach. That is as far as I got with thinking ahead for myself by the early, naive years of my 20’s. The childhood fantasies in my head were supposed to have come together at the point when I said, “I do.” I was supposed to be at peace and anything not like my parents. Instead, I had a mirror held up to me that I was not ready to look at. While most people that go through trials and tribulations find themselves angry or depressed, that was not the case for me. I was just numb to everything around me, even though the little girl inside was crying and alone.

Then, some events came to pass in my life, which changed me forever.

This is my story:

My name is Terra Bella Orleans (Like the famous city everyone writes about in vampire novels.) Back then, I was a 36 year old, single mother of 9 year old twins, one boy and one girl, Frank and Francis. Yes, I know, they have very old fashioned names. Rightly so, because they were named after my husband’s great grandparents. He was insistent on using heirloom names for our children. Both of the children took after their father with their fair skin, freckles, red hair, and blue eyes. We lived by the coast in Northern Maine by forced choice, where the annual average temp is COLD and the population was nonexistent.

The name of the town we lived in was called Moose Trail. Like so many in the United States, it was once a bustling port town that was reduced to nothing but a rundown cluster of buildings in the middle of nowhere. Most of the younger crowds that you would see hanging around town were blue collar workers that were half- crazy with half-crazy children just like them. Some of them stayed because their families owned land there and they either inherited it, or were trying to farm it. The majority of the rest of the population lived at, or below an income the government would consider the standard for poverty. I blamed the “crazy” existing in part to chronic substance abuse in one form or another, and lots of broken families because of it. I could tell you the names of twelve people off the top of my head that I knew of, for a fact, functioned every day with a pint of whiskey in them. The town did have one claim to fame that I just didn’t understand in the slightest. There was a local there who would sit in a tank full of lobsters and come out unscathed. Yes, you read this right ladies and gentleman. His world record for most lobsters in a tank with him was around one thousand, I think. He was once filmed by TV networks and featured on various television documentaries. There was even a mural of him a local artist painted on a downtown building window. In the mural, he was standing up with his arms outstretched, with lobsters hanging off of him by their pinchers. This man was Moose Trail’s only claim to fame. We did have a few amenities though. The town had a school, a tiny grocery store, a dollar store, a post office, a city hall, one gas station, and a local diner/bar called “Dinky’s.” Oh, and the town also had a very old, small, and dilapidated community college called, you guessed it, Moose Trail Community College. Otherwise known as MTCC.

I was told MTCC was once a fine institution of higher learning, but deteriorated and on its last leg financially when I moved to town. Way back when, it catered to the surrounding populations in the county. It specialized in certifications such as beauty school, two year nursing school degrees, and even welding. The state had tried to close it down a few years previous, but the College President came up with some sort of configuration of numbers telling state officials that it was basically the only college available to everyone within a 200 mile radius. So, it stayed open and was running off of a meager budget since. Most of the facilities had peeling paint, asbestos, exposed wire, and sloping floors. I heard of one poor lady that was walking across the floor in a classroom, stepped in a part where the floor was sloping, and then broke her leg. The move up north was a huge change for me. I came from a highly populated area with every convenience a large city had to offer. Complete with a whole array of people to choose to mingle with and places to go. After the move, I was broke, stuck, and just cold. That part was definitely not planned. I am originally from South Louisiana (south of New Orleans to be exact) and I was born of Cajun/Italian decent. My great grandparents were Sicilian immigrants that settled in New Orleans at the turn of the century. My mother was what I would call a bohemian coon ass and my father was an abusive alcoholic. He did what raging alcoholics usually do and she gradually became crazier over the years, from dealing with his incessant nonsense. I think that is where my initial coping mechanisms came from. I learned at an early age to tune everything out around me so I felt nothing. Phycologists call that “disconnecting.” Whatever it was, it worked for me just fine. One does disconnect after numerous times you sit with your mother, while she sobs on the bathroom floor, in order to help her hold a towel to her head to stop the bleeding from being beat by your father. My father finally ended up dying in a drunk driving crash when I was just 14, and I lived with my mother until I was old enough to drive myself. Those were indeed peaceful times. We left each other alone and she was always gone with some random guy she would meet at a bar. She was also always taking some sort of medication to silence the voices inside of her, so I never really experienced her in the same mood twice. I graduated high school early, left for college, and never came back home after graduation. I had no reason to. My mother died when I was 19 in a hospital by herself. Her body could not take any more of life in general and just gave up, I guess. I don’t know how I dealt with any of it. What I do know is that I ignored all of it until it went away. That is how I coped, I just distanced myself. I married someone that I thought was the antithesis of all that I knew to be wrong in this world, when I graduated from college. We met while I was bartending in the French Quarter to pay the bills, fell in love, moved in together, and I worked in a PR firm in New Orleans while he attended medical school. An accidental pregnancy graced us with its presence a few years later, and then we had my beautiful twins. Fortunately, they arrived right before his graduation from medical school, so I was able to stay home with them while he was employed at a local hospital. Don’t get me wrong, our marriage had some serious turbulence as well. In hindsight, I think I looked past a lot of red flags in the name of finding something normal. Our relationship started out perfect and spiraled out of control shortly after that. It was extremely toxic and not only did we fight over everything, we would resort to calling each other names. He was very vindictive as well and forgave nothing. I ended up constantly looking over my shoulder wondering when he would make me pay for a past transgression. Our marriage just got worse over time, never better. Things would usually end up with me leaving him only for him to plead for me to come back. I would always rationalize the reason for my return with the thought that maybe he was somehow different and it would get better. I was totally right, of course, he was different. He was a different kind of screwed up than what I was used to, and dysfunctional as hell, none the less. We fought over everything and he insisted on controlling the finances. He would claim we never had money for anything extra and he always questioned me when I would ask for money from him, even if it was just for groceries. He stayed paranoid and was always accusing me of being up to some sort of mischief behind his back. What I was not aware of, was that he was developing a growing addiction to narcotic medication, which was easily being fed from the field he worked in. His addiction becoming stronger also marked more trouble for our marriage. My husband, while looking back, I now know was bi polar with a borderline personality, and on some serious medication, went off the deep end and decided to commit suicide in the parking lot of the mall. He got off of work one day, parked, and shot himself in the head in the driver’s seat with his shotgun. Just like that without any warning or a note. People that are the mean sorts, what professionals will designate as “abusive,” don’t wake up one morning and advertise themselves as sick individuals. To take away from someone around them, they see as normal as breathing, and it actually gets worse over time without them really noticing. The same thing applies to the abused. The situation gradually slides downhill and sneaks up on you. Pretty soon, you are swallowing a Xanax every day just so you can just tolerate the sound of the abusers voice. Some of us find the strength to leave the situation, and some don’t. We always enter into adulthood thinking some sort of magic wand will be waved and everything will just work itself out. Some of us try and put our faith in money, titles, or prestige thinking it may do the trick. What we don’t understand is those things alone won’t fix what is broken.

So, in conclusion, my abusive upbringing paved the way for me to choose a really sorry jerk for a husband and father, in turn making me a single mother. Fortunately, suicide was covered under his life insurance policy. I also found an account with close to $50,000 in it, where he hoarded most of his paycheck because he was convinced the world would end one day as we knew it. I later found out that paranoia came with his addiction. Against all well-wishing advice, I made a major decision right after the funeral to move as far as I could get away from it all. I no longer wanted to hear jazz music or smell Cajun food cooking. I wanted nothing to do with the south. I wanted to forget all of it and pretend it did not exist. So, I opted to move as far north as I could get in order to forget my past. One split second decision later, I then was a resident of the frozen tundra known as Northern Maine.

My home was paid for but was in dire need of repairs. I also found work as bartender at Dinky’s to feed me and my family. Life went on and I was just going through the daily motions. In the back of my mind, I always wondered about the children and how they were coping. The odd thing is that they both had always been quiet and reserved, even as babies. However, now that the chaos of mental illness was over, they were as peaceful as they have ever been. Don’t get me wrong, the topic of their father did come up. Comments were always made but not in the sense of how they “missed Daddy,” but how their life differed from what it was and how they loved the fact that they left their previous lives behind. Enough of that as I digress. Around February following my move, a job opening at the local community college had opened up and I applied to be a receptionist to the College President. I was hoping to finally put my college degree to good use along with experiencing a bit of a pay raise.

I remember up until that point, it was like living every single day of my life in repeat and it was becoming somewhat maddening. I saw the same simple minded people every day and it just about drove me crazy how small town people can observe everything about you, talk about every single detail to each other, and hang on every morsel of information whether it’s true or not. They can converse about everything I consider so trivial from the polite small talk you engage in, to the car that you drive. Even if it was what you just bought at the grocery store, it was still considered a very hot topic item for conversation for these folks. These types just habitually vomit the trivial information to whoever will listen and not give it any thought as to what is true or what might hurt someone. These are also the same idiots that get their information from chain letters off the internet. One tactic I did find amusing is how instead of asking me questions up front of things they were curious about, they asked my children. Children, after all, are open books to any type of knowledge you would like to gain and they don’t hold back with their opinions. Yet, one more life lesson out of the six hundred and forty three I needed to teach them. Unless the inquiring party has been around you in the ups and downs of your life, they will mask downright nosiness with concernment. I believe that if someone can’t tell you how high your fever was the last time you had the flu, they don’t deserve to know what you have planned for the future. This hot mess seriously burned my cookies and I reminded myself every day that this was as good as it got for them. I found the inquiries and nosiness highly annoying and almost an invasion of privacy. That’s precisely why I did not hold any in depth conversations with anyone around there. When questioned about something, I deflected the answer by changing the subject or asking another question. It easily threw them off. You should try it sometime. However, there are always exceptions to the rule. Baked goods are always the exception to the rule. If they bring you pie or soda bread that is fit to be consumed by the gods, they are keepers.

My two shining lights up until that point had been my widowed and fully Irish neighbors, Miss Betty and her momma, Miss Sadie. The first beloved shining light was Miss Sadie. She was in her eighties and was among the “who’s who” of upper crust society back in the day. She did not have a filter on her mouth and would say anything that managed to pop into her head at the time. She was short with petite features, accompanied by a short pixie hair cut made up of thick hair she kept a faint blue color. She also wore old fashioned, thick rimmed glasses that were fastened to her neck with a gold chain. Miss Sadie’s family had actually been friends with the family that originally built my house. I’ve seen some pictures of her when she was young and she was beautiful, elegant, and classy. She was always dressed to the nines in diamonds and high heels. Miss Sadie was married to a very wealthy businessman and wanted for nothing. Except a husband that truly loved her, would not run around on her, beat her, light her dog on fire, or drink. Small requests, I know. He finally died of a heart attack and left her the hell alone and in peace. Let me rephrase that. He died and did not grace her with his presence anymore. He passed away indeed terrified of his wife and did in fact leave her alone while he was alive. I got bits and pieces as to why in passing conversation. It pertained to him being “mysteriously” poisoned and at deaths door after he killed her dog. Then there was also an incident with him bringing his mistress to their home and Miss Sadie beating her unconscious and giving him stitches in the process. The details are still to this day kind of blurry to me. But, I think Miss Sadie had enough of her husband’s nonsense and laid the law down at one point. So he dared not cross her again and stayed far away from her. She came from a time when you did not divorce your husband, you just looked the other way when he misbehaved. However, I gather Miss Sadie never did look the other way or condone what he did. What I do know, is that their marriage was great at first (hence a child being created) and then kind of deteriorated some years later as his alcoholism progressed.

Miss Sadie’s house was west of mine and came complete with 6 miniature dachshunds that yapped at everything. Our houses were two of the three existing properties off of County Road 311. We were five miles outside of town and at least two miles from the nearest neighbor. The home was left to Miss Sadie after her husband passed away over thirty years ago. Miss Sadie was also an avid gardener back in the day. “The day” would be defined as the same by gone era when women took care of the home and men took care of the women. The “Golden Years” or what have you. If you were born with a vagina back in “the day,” you were allowed few hobbies to choose from that were deemed appropriate for a lady of your pedigree. Tending the gardens was among those said hobbies and Miss Sadie was scary good at it. Her home was an enormous Victorian house with every type of heirloom plant you can think of. I do believe Miss Betty told me some were even shipped in from Europe to find their forever homes in Miss Sadie’s yard. If I did happen to stumble across a grow room full of “Lady Jane,” as Miss Betty called it, I would have neither been shocked nor perplexed. Quite actually, it would have explained quite a bit of what went on around there. Miss Sadie’s house was one of those homes you would normally drive by and shake your head at because you knew at one point in “the day,” it was someone’s realized vision and it stood for something grand and progressive. I know the house had to have been looked at with awe and appreciation when it was built. But, somewhere along the way, the vision was lost due to a death or what have you, and the vision went away with the one that conceived it in the first place. Till this day, I despise that type of process. Now, all that was left was a shell of what once was, and nobody came along to keep the thought alive. It’s was a classic “house of the crying shame,” and I could not for the life of me understand why they let it dilapidate to the point it had gotten to. There was a leak in the upstairs roof for at least a year and I couldn’t even muster up the courage to go and inspect the damage. There was no telling what needed to be ripped out and repaired. The coolest amenity they had in the house was this huge, stained glass greenhouse off of the kitchen. It was filled to the brim with every herb you could think of, and Miss Sadie spent most of her time in there tending to exotic plants she collected. Did I also mention they also claimed the house was haunted? Jokes were constantly made between the two of them about items that would either come up missing, random cold spots in the house, and doors suddenly slamming shut by themselves. They blamed “the ghost” for those things that kept happing that were otherwise unexplainable.

The second beloved shining light, Miss Betty, was in her mid-sixties and came back from her life in Charleston, SC to take care of her ailing mother, Miss Sadie after she was widowed. Miss Betty had left Maine at a very young age to escape an abusive home life only to marry someone just like her daddy. She was a cabaret dancer that worked at a night club where he played music. His name was Tom and he was a real estate tycoon by day in SC and a jazz musician by night. Tom was found dead in a hotel room from an apparent overdose after squandering all of their money on hookers and gambling the weekend before. She personally thought he was actually a closet homosexual battling depression because he was forced to live a life not meant for him. He wanted nothing to do with Miss Betty while they were married and they never had any children. However, depression was another subject never talked about back then, along with quite a few other things so once again, it was left to run its dysfunction cycle. My soul found solace with these two kindred spirits. I came to the conclusion that the crap we are taught at a young age, the crap about “true love,” and “prince charming,” was just that, it was crap. I believed true love did not exist nor did the stupid prince charming all young girls were led to believe in. Both ladies had only each other and fought with one another like a couple of rabid badgers. Hence the reason why I lovingly nicknamed them “The Badgers.” I found witnessing their squabbles to be highly amusing and I got to watch these two old school debutantes cuss like sailors. They were such smart asses to each other but loved each other dearly. Even though they were elderly, they both acted like they were in their 20’s. Their eyes always twinkled and they were extremely quick witted and sarcastic. They also knew just about everything about anything and everyone. I also found it amusing that everyone in the town refused to talk about them at all, like they did not exist. It’s almost if their names came up, people were immediately terrified into silence. I had no idea why, because these two were such sweethearts and I was so thankful for them. They also chain smoked menthol cigarettes, drank like two fish, and still managed to function. Beyond all of this roughness and baggage, there was something so endearing about them. One could tell they were cynical with the world because they could not fix what was broken in their lives before. They both knew very well what was broken around them at every turn, and by all rights they had every right to hate and curse and be bitter like most folks do. However instead of becoming bitter, they channeled it and make sure everything around them was nurtured and thrived. Every decision in their day to day activities revolved around learning from past mistakes. I can tell you this because they would make a comment and follow it up with their reasoning as to why they thought a particular way because of some situation they experienced, when they made the opposite choice in the past, with disastrous results. Miss Betty would always tell me, “It’s not making the mistake that is wrong, it’s not learning from the mistake that is. There is certain liberation from learning from your mistakes. There is also certain liberation with dealing with only the truth.” I also never heard them curse anything except each other. As a matter of fact, it’s when they were not cursing each other, was when I knew something was wrong.

Miss Betty made it a point to come introduce herself shortly after I moved in. She brought chocolate silk pie and some soda bread with an X marked on the top, wrapped in a kitchen towel. “It will ward away the evil juju,” she informed me with a coy smile, as she slathered a half an inch of sage butter on the still warm piece of bread before handing it to me. I did not question anything, but promptly shoved all of it in my mouth like any sane person would. The woman loved to bake and concocted some of the most heavenly items know to the human race. I think she purposely waited until my kids where in school so I did not have to share with anyone. For that reason, I liked her instantly. Miss Betty was about six feet tall, slender, with a beehive of dark mahogany hair. She was also always in full make-up and dripping with diamonds on all occasions. These diamonds accompanied any attire she had on, including a housecoat and a hair net. She was also known to wear formal attire in the middle of the day. I walked in on her on numerous occasions making lunch in a sequined ball gown. However, you did not let the domestication fool you. Miss Betty would fight a grown man, like a grown man, and had a temper liken to a dragon’s. She was also very happy someone was finally living in my house.” It’s nice to have someone over here making this place a home that is complete with children,” she said smiling, as she handed me a piece of pie after feeding me the bread. The minute she found out I was a single mother from the south, was the minute she said she decided to become friends with me. She told me she felt a “warm breeze that smelled of the ocean,” while working outside the previous fall, and knew right then I was coming soon. My Badgers also loved to create scandal and Miss Betty said becoming friends with me would do just the trick. Because remember, trivial minds talk about trivial things. According to Miss Betty, the gossip might have had to do with the fact that I bought the oldest house in town, almost one hundred years old to be exact, and it was owned by one of the founding fathers and the richest man in town. He was the local banker and owned the local shipping ports and lumber yards. It was said that even the local prostitutes were to have hated him because he was so sadistic to woman. His last name was Tucker and local legend had it that Mrs. Tucker, was, “supposedly a witch,” and my house was, “supposedly haunted.” The summary of the past history of this place, according to my Badgers, is the normal scandalous lore. I refer to it as normal because as you can tell, relationship dysfunction was now my normal up until that point. My house sat on the market for almost ten years before I moved and bought it. The previous owners acquired it from distant relatives of the original owners and began restorations. Then out of nowhere, they packed up and left in the middle of the night without so much as a notice, and the house fell into foreclosure. Nobody knew exactly why however, a few locals made their theories known. Before the last owners purchased the home, it sat vacant since the original owner’s deaths right around the turn of the century. I was told the original owner came up missing after a drinking binge, and the wife committed suicide in the house awhile later. There was no judgment from me after hearing about their unfortunate circumstances. Because my own mother would have done the same thing had it not been for involuntary commitment and Lithium.

Since the wife’s suicide, local stigma deemed the house uninhabitable, and anyone within a fifty mile radius would not touch it because it was unofficially declared cursed and haunted. Personally, I didn’t believe any of that hogwash. Since I moved into the house, I neither saw nor heard anything unusual that could not be explained. Except once, out on the property late one night, but I think it was the aurora lights playing tricks on me. Those lights were an anomaly in the northern states and absolutely gorgeous to look at. Come to think of it, sometimes I also felt like I was being watched, but I blamed it on lack of sleep. Being a single mother was tough and rest was never on my agenda. Doors in my house would slam shut by themselves too, however, doors shutting by themselves could be blamed on the place being so drafty.

My house was also an old Victorian home that was over five thousand square feet, three stories, six bedrooms, four bathrooms, and oh so needed a complete overhaul. I fell in love with the decrepit thing the first time I laid eyes on her. She was discovered on the internet and I made an instant offer before driving up. She was beautiful and came extremely cheap. So, we naturally became friends instantly. She had intrinsic gables, a wraparound porch, and my favorite amenity, a real tower where the twins would disappear to and play for hours. Don’t get me wrong, I had to scrub the thing from top to bottom when we moved in, because of all the dust and mouse droppings scattered everywhere. I threw some fresh paint on a few things and commenced to cleaning out all of the old junk. The people that owned it before me, repaired some of the large ticket necessities such as plumbing, a new metal roof, rotted wood, and they also leveled parts of the house, except the hallway. Walking down the hallway was like walking in a ditch. There were also quite a few pieces of breath taking antique furniture left behind. My plan was to restore them sometime in the near future to their former glory. Also, stacks of remodeling supplies still remained on the property, most in its original packaging. The one piece of furniture deemed my favorite out of all that was left behind, was a huge full length mirror made out of some sort of dark red wood. The frame was carved to look like native animals you would find in the woods around the home. The larger animals such as the opossum or raccoon were located towards the bottom. Moving towards the top, you could find squirrels and birds in the frame all carved in intrinsic detail. The portraits were positioned as such, to look as though they were trying to sneak up to the mirror to get a peek of their reflection. Besides the actual mirror part being discolored due to its age, this particular piece was absolutely beautiful, original, and brilliant. I found it in one of the upstairs closets, covered in sheets. After an afternoon of huffing and puffing in order to keep from dropping the mirror down the stairs, I managed to move it into my room by the foot of my bed. My entire body was sore for a week and I think I broke my toe in the process.

My house’s flaws would be that the floors still creaked loudly, she still sported the old and extremely inefficient single paned windows, and the electrical really needed to be updated. You could not run the microwave and a hairdryer at the same time or you would short a fuse. This would result in a complete blackout of the entire house and me having to go out back with a flashlight to turn the breaker back on. Not fun when the wind chill was dipping to negative four degrees and there was a blizzard taking place. The fireplace on the main floor was built to burn wood and not coal like most homes of the era, since Moose Trail was once a logging town and wood was a plentiful resource. So, I considered myself very lucky we still had a heating source if the power went out. I also managed to buy a few space heaters to put in the bedrooms, bought extra blankets from a yard sale and put those on the beds, and covered all of the single paned windows in plastic in order for us to get through the winter in one piece.

My house was also once a grand thing to look at like Miss Sadie’s, but that was a long time ago and I was still finding areas of the place that I had no idea existed. Like a trap door in the kitchen that went down to a root cellar. I inadvertently found out it existed one morning as I was continuing my aerobic workout time into the kitchen and accidently fell through the floor. I spent two days on the couch after performing that trick. The house was also surrounded by one hundred acres of an apple orchard made up of mature, but diseased overgrown trees that stretched out to the sky like deformed nostalgic freak show performers trying to stand up right. The orchard was extremely spooky at night. I did not know the first thing about apple trees or how to correct the issues they exhibited. So, therefore I had zero plans on any type of outside projects. What sold me on really buying the place was the privacy of it all. At night, when I went out after all the housework was finished and I could smoke a menthol cigarette, it was quite eerie to look off my front porch through the orchard, with moonlight shining through, and hear wolves howl off in the distance. Sometimes, if I listened close enough, I did hear creaking and groaning. But, I think it was the wind that moved through the branches. My kids and I were out in the boondocks and it would have taken an ambulance twenty minutes to respond in case there was ever an emergency that called for it. There was also no cell service in the area, so we had the old fashioned phone line. I did have the occasional stray dog wander into my yard. But, I was not in the business of letting one of my children get attacked by some feral animal. So, I solved the problem by throwing lit fire crackers close enough to the animals to scare them off my property. The tactic worked like a charm.

Besides applying for a new job opening as a receptionist at the local community college, my future was pretty open to possibilities. I take that back, the kids were begging me to get a dog. One of Miss Betty’s dogs was expecting, so I thought I would take her up on the offer to give the kids one of those puppies when the time came.