Tamara

Something Sticky…

Another October creepy tale to share… Enjoy!
By the time I was about 15 or 16 years old, my parents would leave me home alone for a long weekend from time to time.  I was not the kind of kid who did any bad stuff – I was sober until I was 21 and any wild parties I hosted happened long after I had moved out of my parent’s house.  
So on that summer night, when I was 17 going on 18, at 11:00 PM, it was not a big deal for me to come home from my boyfriend’s house to a dark empty one.  In fact, I enjoyed and savored the opportunity to stay up and watch whatever I liked and listen to whatever I wanted as loud and as late as I cared to stay up.  I was planning on making a night of it!  Little did I know, a horror movie scene was waiting for me on the other side of the door.
I was a weird kid.  Well, I’m a weird adult too.  But as a kid I was fascinated with the idea of living in a deaf or blind culture and I always wondered how I would fare.  On this particular night I decided to test by blindness skills. Would I be able to make it through my house in the complete darkness with only my other senses guiding me?  So as I entered the house, I closed my eyes tight, kicked off my shoes and failed to turn on a single light.  I made my way from the front entry way and down the hall, sliding my feet along the tiles and across the linoleum in the kitchen.  My goal was to find the answering machine so I could check to see if my parents had called.  I peeked, and sure enough the red light was blinking, telling me that a message awaited me on the tape.
I squeezed my eyes shut again and rounded the corner around the couch and began to make my way across the family room.  But something didn’t feel right on the Berber carpet.  It felt clammy, wettish, and something squishy was rolling around and sticking to the bottoms of my socks.  I made it to the couch and sat down, pressing the button on the answering machine.  The messages began to play while I fumbled for the light, mildly curious about what had been spilled on the carpet.  The light came on, and the scene that greeted me totally made me dismiss the messages that were playing.  I surveyed the room, staring at the carpet that was squirming and alive with hundreds and hundreds of maggots.  I gasped, shocked at the sight of their white, writhing bodies.  On my socks were the remnants of many of their brothers and sisters, some dead, some alive.  I threw them off of me and sat, bare footed on my sofa as I formed a plan.
I knew the maggots had to be coming from somewhere.  They were copious, so there was probably something pretty disgusting under a couch nearby.  The weird thing was, there was no smell… So I hopped from the sofa I was sitting onto the sofa kitty corner to it.  I looked on the linoleum, and spying a maggot- free zone I headed to it.  And like hopping on stones across a river, I made it out of there to the entryway where I put my shoes on.  
The plan I had formulated involved sweeping them with a broom into a dustpan and throwing them out.  But sweeping up maggots is a lot like sweeping up rice, they stuck to the bristles and rolled around instead of sliding across the linoleum and carpet.  So I turned to the vacuum instead.  We had one of those tank vacuums, not an upright, so I took the hose and just started sucking up their squirming bodies.  I would make progress, cleaning up the maggots in an area then I’d stop to flip over a couch or chair.  Finding nothing, I’d move onto the next piece of furniture, cleaning first around it, then wincing as I flipped it, expecting to find a chicken leg, a dead animal or, at the very least, an old bowl of oatmeal or something.  But as I cleaned and flipped, nothing appeared.  I remember getting to the last thing to flip and knowing that under that couch there would be something super disgusting. I remember dreading flipping the couch on it’s back, knowing that whatever was under there had to be dealt with by me. I couldn’t let it sit until my mom and dad came home.  As a vegetarian, I was offended that I was left to deal with a rotting carcass!  But I flipped it, and nothing was under there.
That is when I sort of started to get skeeved out.  Where had all of these maggots come from, if not from a source in the house?  I felt unnerved, to say the least.  I turned around to look at my progress, and I think my horror movie mind took over for a moment.  In my memory, it seems like the maggots had reappeared, the ones I had cleaned up seemed to have returned! In my mind’s eye, I can remember seeing the maggots squirming out from between the Berber carpet fibers, close-up, their black little eyes oscillating on the ends of their torpedo shaped bodies.  I started to panic, getting hysterical, I started to cry.
What was going on?!  I was convinced I was the subject of a practical joke, but the joke wasn’t funny.  I had been cleaning maggots for two hours and they just seemed to be sticking around.  While it was around one AM at this point, I felt like I needed to call for some back- up.  I called my boyfriend.
His step- dad, Mike, answered the phone.  I very calmly and politely asked to speak with Brandon.  He very calmly and politely asked me if I realized what time it was.  I very calmly and politely told him I was aware, but that I was having a bit of an emergency, and oh please could I please oh please talk to Brandon?  Please?  Sensing the hysteria creeping into my voice, he handed to phone over to Brandon, at which point I went into full- on hysteria mode: a high pitched, squealing out keening and wailing version of what was going on, told through sobs and tears of course.  Brandon talked me down from the ledge and told me to go wait on the front porch.  He was coming to get me.  I remember when he got there, the sense of relief that flooded me, being able to share this bizarre incident with someone else.  He took me to his house that night where I slept on the couch in his maggot- free family room.
I returned the next Morning, in the light of day.  It wasn’t a dream, indeed there were still maggots.  Again we searched out the source, thinking perhaps I had missed something, but again found nothing.  We cleaned up the remainder of the maggots, and aside from a few that turned up here and there over the next few days, they disappeared.  When my parents came home, they were alarmed at the story.  My dad crawled all over under the house to see if something had happened down there, but came up empty handed.  My brothers were called, but nobody claimed responsibility.  To this day, I’m not sure what happened, but I can tell you one thing: I HATE MAGGOTS!  (And I still pretend I’m blind from time to time too. Yeah, I said I’m a weird adult…)

Posted on 10.28.11 to Tamara. Grab the feed. No comments yet. Comment or trackback from your own site.

Tamara

New Favorite: Bellevue Botanical Gardens

The kids and Bradley had already been twice before I had a chance to go once.  I heard magical tales of ‘the best zip line ever’, the troll door, the trails and the beautiful plants that are cared for and curated by the many gardeners/docents who tend to the acres and acres of plants.

And all of their words were true.  Maintained to a T, gorgeous plants, trees and bushes arranged beautifully, artfully.  We meandered through the trails, marveling at the thoughtfulness of plant pairings and their placement.  Everywhere gardeners were busily raking leaves, cutting back plants in preparation for winter, and even setting up for the Christmas garden – they make an amazing light display in December that is unparallelled – and FREE.

If you spend enough time in the garden, you discover all kinds of secret little nooks and crannies.  There are bells to ring, stone bridges to cross, a Japaneses garden and tea house, and even a little troll door that we are certain leads to somewhere magical…

And lest we forget, even further down the way, there is a zip line that is fun enough for the kids, and strong enough for adults to ride without scraping their backsides along in the play chips.

Posted on 10.24.11 to Tamara. Grab the feed. No comments yet. Comment or trackback from your own site.

Emerson Jude

Umbrella Days

Posted on 10.23.11 to Emerson Jude. Grab the feed. No comments yet. Comment or trackback from your own site.

Tamara

The Face at the Window

Since October is the month for spooks, scares and that tingly feeling that crawls up the back of your neck, I thought it would be fun to share a real life spooky story of my own.  in light of Gigi’s recent slumber party, this tale seemed DREADFULLY appropriate!

When I was a kid I loved slumber parties – at my house or someone else’s; it didn’t matter, you could count me in.  I loved staying up super late, and more than anything, I loved staying up late with my friends and no grown ups.  We ruled the tv, the snacks, our bedtime, and the best secrets, confessions and friendship bonds came out in those wee hours with only the best of friends present.  It probably comes as no surprise, then, that my tenth birthday party was a sleepover.  By the time my tenth birthday rolled around, I was a sleepover veteran.  I’d been to enough of them to know the rules – food, games, cake and presents with the parents, then they would go to bed while we watched endless movies and had giggle contests in stereo!  We were loud, we were raucous, we were having the best of times.

For this party, we had set up downstairs in my family room.  I think I had around eight girls over, and we were crammed into the room like sardines, spread out across the floor and the hide-a-bed sofa.  My family room was at the back of our house, partnered with our kitchen, and the windows and sliding door faced out to our back yard.  Because it faced our back yard, and, beyond that, a cow pasture, my parents never got blinds or curtains for that room; our privacy was provided by nature and distance.  We never really paid attention to the darkness outside, as inside was warmth and happiness.  The opaque blackness didn’t bother us one bit…  Until…

It became the witching hour of sleepovers.  That time of night when some kids are tired and beginning to doze, and others, like me, were too amped up on skittles, Doritos and strawberry soda to even consider going to sleep.  It was the perfect time for whispering spooky stories and remembering the tales that are often told around campfires.  I remember reaching the point of finally calming down.  It was, perhaps, around two or three in the morning in my remembrance.  In reality it was probably more like eleven, but staying up late stories and recounting the hours of sleep you got at a sleepover is a lot like fisherman tales – in my memory we never went to sleep before five AM and never got more than two hours of sleep.  The reality is much different, I’m sure.

Anyhow, my friend Cassandra suddenly bolted upright in her sleeping bag, pointing at the oily dark, black window.  She was pointing at the face of a man, a strange man, peering in at us through the window in the wee hours of the morning.  She shakily said to me, “Tami!  There’s a weird guy there!” Her voice started as a tremble and crescendo-ed into scream by the end of her statement.  “What do we do?!”

My answer to that was with a scream, “Mooooooommmmmm!” When I screamed, the man dashed away from the window into the darkness of my back yard, and all of the girls,  asleep or awake, startled, ducked their heads under their pillows and sleeping bags and we all started screaming for my mom as loud as we could.  We were startled, terrified, horrified and felt like our party had been invaded, our security compromised.

My mom finally came marching downstairs, mad as a hornet.  When we told her what happened, she was remarkably blasé about the whole thing.  She even opened the slider and turned on the light to the deck to see if someone was indeed out there in the darkness of our back yard, then admonished us that it was late and we needed to settle down and go to sleep.  I’m sure she thought we were either being silly or had scared ourselves with ghost stories to the point that we had a group hallucination or something!  She headed back upstairs to her room, leaving us feeling very uncomfortable, very nervous and very exposed.

We laid there, that night, for quite some time in the complete dark, daring one another to look at the window to check if ‘he’ was back, eventually drifting off to sleep among scared whispers and freaky thoughts.

The next morning it was all we could talk about, the face at the window.  We checked with everyone we knew, telling them the story of the face at the window, but no one ever fessed up to being our peeper.  As an adult, I had let it go as a sleepover story that probably existed only in my imagination, until a few years ago when I reconnected with Cassandra on Facebook and she reminded me.  At that point I knew the story wasn’t just mine, it was real, it was something that really did happen.  Not in my imagination, but to everyone at that party.

Posted on 10.21.11 to Tamara. Grab the feed. No comments yet. Comment or trackback from your own site.

Tamara

Spa Time

Spa shot from Gigi’s sleepover, honey & yogurt face mask with cucumber eye slices… Ahhh… Relaxing!

Posted on 10.15.11 to Tamara. Grab the feed. No comments yet. Comment or trackback from your own site.