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Cedar Key is an old fishing village about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville, an island in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s often referred to as “old Florida” because not much has changed here in decades. I set my novel Ghost Key here. It isn’t a tourist mecca, like the 113-mile string of islands that stretch from Miami to Key West, connected by a single road and 42 bridges. In fact, I’m always surprised how many Floridians have never heard of Cedar Key.

We’ve been visiting the island for years, staying in different areas – in a condo on the Gulf, in a house on a magnificent salt marsh, and most recently in a house on stilts on a dead end road that faces Gooseneck Bay. A dog friendly house.

Cedar Key has an intriguing history. In 1999, an archeological dig at Shell Mound, 9 miles north of the island, found artifacts in the top ten feet of a 28-foot tall mound that date back to 500 BC. A skeleton that was 2,000 years old was found in an ancient burial site. What lies even farther down inside that mound?

The original Cedar Key was called Atsena Otie Key and lies about half a mile away. In the late 1800s, it was home to a pencil-wood factory – Eagle pencils – and several hundred residents. The cedar trees that provided the wood for the pencils were wiped out and in 1896, so was the island. That was the year a hurricane and a ten-foot storm surge flattened Atsena Otie Key. The survivors moved to another island and built the present-day Cedar Key.

Today, the original island is managed by the Cedar Keys National Wildlife Refuge and if you rent kayaks or a boat, the island is accessible. We did kayaks one day and rented a boat the next and took the dogs with us.

They were overjoyed to be on solid ground after two hours of drifting and fishing, and leaped into the water to cool off.

Then we all headed for the boardwalk and path through the wilderness of oaks strung with Spanish moss.

The path used to be the main street through town and all along it, white butterflies flit and dance through light and shadows until it ends at a spooky cemetery.

When you enter this place, the air changes. It’s not that the heat or humidity are replaced by frigid air; it’s something more subtle. I immediately felt that all the white butterflies we saw coming in were spirits, and that some of them were the spirits of the 25 people buried here.

Several of the ornately carved gravestones have withstood the weathering of more than a century. As I snapped photos with my phone, I suddenly felt like a time traveler, plunked down in a strange little town in the late 1890s. I started wondering about and imagining the lives of some of the people buried here. For a novelist, this place lends itself to the wild and unpredictable.

The challenges the residents of this island faced just in terms of climate must have been formidable. The interminable heat. The bugs. Just the bugs would be enough to make me flee – mosquitoes the size of 747s, no-seeums barely as large as a period that bite their way through your hair, spiders with massive webs strung between the trees.

These people also faced disease – malaria and typhoid among the most prevalent And, of course the hurricanes and dramatic tide changes. At low tide, there was probably a floor of soggy mud all the way to today’s Cedar Key. Low tide would have been a great time to harvest clams and crabs. Here’s Megan, pretending to eat a dead Horseshoe crab she found in the sand.

I knew that if I stood in the midst of these oaks that shaded the cemetery, relaxed and with my eyes shut, I would be able to pull that time around me. If I did that, would I be able to get back to my own time? Coward that I am, I snapped my photos and kept moving.

The gravestones – the etchings of dates, of signs and symbols, the names themselves – reveal bits and pieces of a lost culture. Fragments have survived in the present day Cedar Key – the stilt houses built on tall concrete pilings to withstand any storm surge, the fishing tradition, the camaraderie and friendliness of the people who call this place home. And always wherever you venture of the island, there’s the lure and mystery of the sea.

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We recently posted two stories from our friend Dale Dassel  about his  mother’s pending death, her death, and the synchronicities that followed. This is the second story that involves a ladybug as a spirit messenger.

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It’s been exactly one month since Mom passed, and things have finally settled down. But something really amazing happened last night around 12:30 a.m., as I was reading in bed. I began to grow drowsy, so I put the novel aside and lay calmly, gazing around my room for awhile just thinking about life but nothing in particular.

I was about to open the book to resume reading when I heard Mom’s voice clearly in my mind: I can hear you now. It seemed to come from immediately beside me, as if she were standing right by the bed. If my eyes had been closed, I would’ve sworn she just opened the door and walked into the room. The words were spoken with absolute calm; a matter-of-fact statement in her own voice, crystal clear. I looked in the direction of the voice in mild surprise, as it was completely out of the blue. I wasn’t even thinking about Mom, and she had never said that to me before, so I don’t have a mental sound byte of that sentence. She had spoken to me.

Being the emotional person that I am, I grew teary as I began talking to her, mentally at first, then speaking aloud. Over the next 20 minutes, I told her everything that had transpired since she departed. I told her how much we love and miss her, and reassured her that we were okay. The experience was very moving, and I am convinced that her presence was in the room, listening to me (I’m crying as I type this right now). When I was finished, I asked her to give Dad a sign or message that she was still with us. Then I went to sleep.

Today I related the incident to Dad and asked if he’d received a particular message or dream about Mom. He said he has dreams about her all the time, but nothing that stands out in his mind. He believes she is still with us, but said that some people are more receptive than others when it comes to this type of communication.

I personally have never seen a ghost / had spirit communication (with the exception of the dream message from Grandma after she died). But I firmly believe that Mom is honoring my request when I asked her to give me a sign from the other side (via the ladybug that came to me the week before she passed over). Last week, as I was getting into my car to go back to work after my lunch break, I was sitting in the driver seat with the door open, talking to Dad in the driveway, when a ladybug landed on the windshield between us. I immediately pointed it out and said that it’s Mom saying ‘hi’ to us. 🙂

These synchros are wonderfully reassuring, and they make it so much easier to handle this transition. I’m so glad that Mom is okay, and able to communicate with us from time to time.

Antillean Crested Hummingbird

When our family lived in Caracas, the American newspaper, The Daily Journal, ran a contest. They showed a cartoon of a cute little alien with his palm extended. Contestants were to caption the cartoon and the best caption would win a week’s trip to Barbados for two.

My dad, who as far as I know never had any interest in aliens, entered a caption: Yes, we do deliver. And it won! He paid the difference for my sister and I and a few months later, we landed in Barbados, an island in the Netherlands Antilles. I think I was 12, which meant my sister was nearly 7.

We stayed at a very cool hotel in Bridgeport, the main town. The hotel, I remember, was small, and we had a suite or apartment on the first floor. Out back, there was an open porch that faced the beach. It had a table and chairs and a glorious view of the beach. Every afternoon, waiters brought around the tea and crumpets and the four of us would sit out there, sunburned from our beach combing, and sip tea like proper British folks, which we weren’t.

One afternoon, I was sitting out there by myself, trying to decide if I should dip my spoon into the sugar bowl and add a couple of teaspoons to my tea, which I didn’t really like. A hummingbird suddenly appeared on the porch and touched down on the edge of the sugar bowl. I was shocked. I’d never seen a hummingbird this close before. It was a beautiful little thing with luminous bluish green wings like the bird in the photo above. And it moved fast, those wings pumping, fluttering, keeping it aloft as it dipped its delicate beak into that mountain of sugar in the bowl.

I think this memory is so vivid for me, so many years after the fact, because it was when I realized, if only intuitively, that we are all part of a much larger picture. It was the instant that I recognized I was part of an intricate web of sensations and connections that extended well beyond my little world of family, friends, Venezuela and this Barbados trip. That hummingbird and I were connected in an inexplicable way. I tasted that sugar when he dipped his beak into the sugar bowl. I felt the frantic beat of his wings, the hammering of his little heart, his fear of me as a huge shape nearby. But his hunger overcame his fear and he feasted from that sugar bowl.

Ever since, I have been fascinated by hummingbirds. In Ecuador some years ago, we stayed in a place in the high mountains where hummingbirds flocked to the feeders in the evening, dozens of them vying for food, their wings moving so fast they generated a sound, a collective humming. We stood at the windows watching them up close, jut a thin pane of glass between us.

During the winter months here in Florida we sometimes spot hummingbirds, the ruby-throated variety. In fact, the other day, I was thinking about my parents, both deceased, and a pair of hummingbirds touched down on the plants just outside my window.

A shudder of shock tore through me. Mom? Dad? Really? Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing? Maybe these figures were actually fast-moving butterflies. Or something else altogether.

They were there – then gone.

And I thought of the Barbados hummingbird way back when, and how my family and I had come to be in that place, at that time, when the beautiful little bird touched down on the edge of the sugar bowl. My parents had made that trip possible. I was pretty sure they had just dropped by to say hello.

The Clintons at Trump’s wedding in 2015

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Bernie Sanders’s path to the presidential nomination just got a lot more difficult tonight. He won just one state – Rhode Island – out of five. Clinton has far more delegates than Bernie and more super delegates, that UNdemocratic rule in the Democratic party that makes sure the party – rather than the people – have the final say about who becomes the nominee.

Trump swept all five states by huge margins.

Unless something nearly miraculous happens, Clinton and Trump will be the nominees. I would love to see a woman as president, but not Clinton. She’s part of the political machine, entrenched in establishment politics, in bed with Wall Street, and I’ve yet to hear the kind of passion from her that I hear continually from Sanders.

Yes, she’s smart and experienced and, thanks in large part to Obama appointing her secretary of state, knows her foreign policy. Unfortunately, her foreign policy is business as usual – the U.S. as world cop, endless war in the Mideast, take out dictators whom we helped put into power…well, we all know this story by now.

Her vote for the war in Iraq helped propel the chaos in the Mideast, the rise of Isis, and terrorism and did not, as one of Bush’s boys predicted, end with the people of Iraq welcoming us with open arms. Instead, with the fall of Baghdad, the seething cauldron of hatred and fear and poverty blew wide open and here we are in 2016, trillions of dollars later, thousands of Americans dead, countries decimated, and millions of displaced people on the move.

Clinton claims she would rein in Wall Street, but her super pacs of banker boys have raised millions for her. Her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street organizations have earned her sums that most of us won’t see in our lifetimes.

When pressured to release transcripts of her speeches, she gives that annoying Hillary laugh and says she would be glad to release them if all the other candidates do the same. That means the Republicans. Sanders doesn’t have any transcripts to release. He doesn’t have any super pacs. Yet, he has raised more money than any other candidate through small online donations from ordinary people, several million of them. She is losing among young voters who realize what they may gain through a Sanders presidency and what they stand to lose with a Clinton presidency.

Tonight in Philadelphia when she gave her victory speech, I was struck by just how far to the left her rhetoric has moved since this campaign started. At some points she sounded like Sanders – but just the words not the genuine passion of convictions. Like Claire Underwood in House of Cards, Clinton is a strategist, an opportunist whose instincts are so sharply honed she’s able to sniff out the political climate and play to it.

My neighbors, whom I’ve known for 11 years, are Republicans. And for the first time, we are on the same political page. If Sanders is the nominee, they will vote for him because what he says about big money in politics, about the hold corporate America and the banking industry have over the rest of us resonates for them. If Clinton is the nominee, they will vote Republican – i.e., Trump. I have friends who are Clinton supporters, friends who are supporters of Sanders. And I doubt that the Sanders supporters will vote for Clinton just to keep a Dem in the White House. They will probably choose to sit out this election.

In a recent town hall, Sanders was asked how he would unify the party if Clinton was the nominee. I thought his response was terrific, that it wasn’t incumbent on him to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton. She was the one who would have to win them over by moving farther to the left in her platform. Free college tuition at public universities. Health care as a right for all rather than a privilege. Overturning Citizens United. Not engaging in endless war. Moving rapidly away from fossil fuels. She would have to embrace more of his truly progressive platform. After all, Clinton needs the youth vote and the independents who embrace Sanders if she is to win the presidency.

If she is the nominee, I don’t think she can beat Trump. He appeals to angry racists who must have an enemy- the Mexicans, the Muslims, ISIS, take your pick. Hatred is often just as powerful as love. In spite of my hope that we are moving into a new, more progressive paradigm, the old guard is alive and well and turning out in shocking numbers for Trump.

I recently told a friend that I would be sitting out this election if Clinton is the nominee. Her response: But we can’t have a President Trump! Well, maybe Trump is the exclamation point at the end of a long haul since a movie star named Ronald Reagan won the White House. If we are incapable of connecting the dots, if we continually vote against our best interests as a nation and as individuals, then perhaps he is the president we deserve.

At the very least, Bernie has changed the dialogue in this country and made people more aware of the existing disparities and inequalities. And, in the larger scheme of things, that’s no small feat.

Whenever someone famous and talented, someone who has made an impact, dies, people notice synchronicities. Not surprisingly, that has been the case with the death of Prince at age 57. I started noticing the color purple on web sites, clothes and cars. Maybe the colors were always out there, but I had no reason to notice. I read where someone heard about Prince’s death, looked outside, and saw a purple roadster drive by.

Robert, aka Rabbit, a longtime friend from my hometown of Minneapolis, which was also Prince’s place of birth, life and death, wrote about a synchronicity he experienced on the day of Prince’s death.

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“A while back I heard an NPR or a MPR interview with author Alan Light on a new biography of Nina Simone What Happened, Miss Simone, which I picked up today at the the Rondo public library. Looking at Light’s other titles I saw: Let’s Go Crazy: Prince and the Making of Purple Rain. That, of course, caught my attention. I’d just the news. Before I started reading, I browsed the index and found a “Prince” entry. Late in her career, considering tunes for a covers album, Simone thought about Prince’s Sign of the Times, which she eventually recorded.

“Years ago in Jamaica I was staying with Maggie and her Jamaican boyfriend Chester, who had gone to school in Texas, was in NYC during the “Shaft” years, and loved Philly soul. I can remember he and I heard on the radio that Nina Simone had died, and we talked about her career. I can’t remember what time of year it was although it certainly wasn’t summer. Randomly reading through the book now…Nina in Barbados, in Liberia, I came across…Nina Simone’s date of death:  April 21, 2003! Wow, wow….today’s date, and now the date of Prince’s death.

“I’m glad I got to experience the dynamic genius of Prince Rogers Nelson in concert at First Avenue in his prime, before he did arena gigs.”

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I saw him only once, when he was 16, a year before he signed a recording contract. It was in an old out-of-business movie theater in North Minneapolis. A neighbor mentioned the show and recommended seeing the kid, that he was going to be big. I don’t remember much about his performance that day. Oddly, the only thing I recall is that my ex and I were among the few white folks in the crowd. In other words, he hadn’t been discovered yet.

Late this afternoon, I was sitting in our backyard, reading, while Nika and Noah played tug of war with a toy. I happened to look up and realized the bougainvillea bush was in full bloom. I decided to test the camera on my iPhone 6s to see how   it performed for a close up.

Just as I approached the bougainvillea, a dragonfly touched down on a branch and stayed there while I snapped the photo and didn’t fly away from five or ten minutes afterward.

What’s interesting about this little incident, other than the beauty of it, is that less than an hour before, I was in Megan’s room, trying to decide what to tackle first. Our neighbor recently gave us a great bed that we put in her room and now stuff has to be moved or discarded. What decorates her walls? Dragonflies that she painted when she was in high school. This little guy is just one of a dozen or so.

After I decided I didn’t have the energy to tackle her room yet, I was reading about animals as messengers and thinking about the first time I heard of dragonflies as symbolic of news. I was picking Megan up from middle school and a Peruvian psychic, Maya, who lived across the street, was with me. When a dragonfly flitted across the windshield, she exclaimed, “Oh, Trish beautiful! Good news is on the way.”

“It is?”

“That’s what dragonflies mean.”

At the time, I was waiting to hear about whether my contract with a publisher would be renewed. “Is there a time frame?”

“The adult dragonfly lives for just a few months if the weather is warm. But in cooler periods, it may not live longer than a few weeks.”

I liked the few weeks scenario better than I did the few months. Sure enough a few weeks later my contract was renewed.

I don’t wish this dragonfly a short life, but I do hope his appearance means a few weeks rather than months. Regardless, it was one of those synchros that made me feel I was back in the flow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiZD6Td8wNg&feature=youtu.be

I play the on-line game, Words With Friends, and the other day a new player arrived with the name: Herman.Cain. Right away I thought of one of the Republican candidates for U.S. president in 2012. Herman Cain became known for his 9-9-9 plan. He said it so often that people couldn’t mention his name without saying ‘9-9-9.’

Then, the next day Jane Clifford sent me the above YouTube video about the number 9. She also wrote this:

“Utterly mind blowing!

– 1,440 minutes in a day reduce to 9.

– 86,400 seconds in a day reduce to 9.

– 10,080 minutes a day = 9. 5.25,600 mins in a year = 9 !

– All angles in a circle ,triangle, square, tetrahedron etc reduce to 9. The number 9 governs time and space!”

She also wrote that right after she posted the video on her FB page, she wrote an e-mail to a friend and saw that it was sent at 9:09. She added that her life number in numerology is 9.

I doubt that I’m playing Word With Friends with the 9-9-9 guy. It’s probably another Herman Cain or someone using the name for whatever weird reason. But it proved to be a synchronicity.

In astrology, Mars isn’t known as the red planet that may or may not someday sustain human life. In astrology, it’s about forward momentum, our sexuality, our capacity for aggression and competition, for achieving our ambitions. It governs surgery that involves knives, weapons, war. It’s about action. Every two years, it turns retrograde, when it appears to be moving backward relative to the earth. In a very real, personal sense, this retro period slows down our lives.

We encounter delays in areas that are important to us. Our physical energy may not be quite up to par. Our ambitions may be thwarted by circumstances.

On April 17, Mars turned retrograde in fire sign Sagittarius, and won’t straighten out again until June 29. If you know your time, place, and date of birth, get your free birth chart here to find out where Mars in Sagittarius falls in your chart. Here’s the link for finding out what the houses mean.

The best way to deal with this retrograde is to go with the flow, as stymied as it may be. During a retrograde in 2005, a month after my dad had died, I was stopped for speeding and got a ticket, my first in years. I tried to explain to the cop that my dad had just died (sob stories sometimes help!) but this guy wasn’t listening. My ticket cost me nearly $200 and time in an online traffic school.

A few days before this Mars retro, Rob got a speeding ticket on his way to teach a yoga class and is now taking the very boring online traffic course that saves you money and points on your license. The message with Mars retro is TO SLOW DOWN and if you don’t do it willingly the universe will do it for you.

This Mars retro will be combined, starting April 28, with a Mercury retrograde in Taurus, the second Merc retro this year, which lasts until May 22. We’ve written about Mercury retros before. But the gist is that communication goes awry, travel is screwed up, computers crash, appliances die, and it’s a time that favors revisions, reconsideration, rethinking.

Fortunately, this year’s presidential election in the U.S. doesn’t happen under a Mercury retro, as it did in November 2000. Astrologers back then were predicting chaos and, sure enough, at 7:49 p.m., NBC decided they had enough data from exit polls in Florida and Tom Brokaw called the state for Al Gore. With Florida’s 25 electoral votes, it meant he had won the election.

However, shortly after 10 p.m. – less than an hour after Mercury had turned direct – Brokaw backtracked and said that George W. Bush had won the state and the election. We all know what ensued after that – the endless dispute over the chads on Palm Beach County’s ballot and the eventual decision by the Supreme Court that Bush was the 43^rd president of the U.S. Welcome to the global world of a Mercury retro.

Mars, Mercury. Our physicality and the way we communicate. When they go dormant, we feel it. But our experiences of these retrogrades depend on how we act and react, how in tune we are with ourselves and the larger world.

This image makes for an interesting visual synchronicity. At left is Enzo Ferrari, the founder of Ferrari autos and Mesut Özil, a German soccer player who plays on an English team and is considered one Europe’s most gifted footballer.

Ferrari died in 1988 and Mesut was born the same year. So maybe after a lifetime of inventiveness, Ferrari moved onto sports.

Or not. It would be interesting to know if the two have other similar personality and life traits. Looking like someone from the past doesn’t mean you were that person. Just like two people who look alike and are both alive may have no genetic relationship.

I like the concept of past lives and future lives, but not so much the idea of one life following the next in linear fashion. Instead, I see reincarnation as lives all happening simultaneously and one life possibly influencing another both forward and back through time. In other words, my past and future selves are all living their lives in the Now. What I do might affect a past life or future life, and a future life – which from a linear time point of view doesn’t yet exist – can affect my present life.

Of course, it’s kind of complicated to think about such influences since we live day-to-day in linear time. In a way, it’s like cultures, such as the Mayans, that have two calendars – one, the everyday calendar, and the other, a spiritual calendar.

You’ve got to wonder, though, Ozil drives a Ferrari.

A haunted place is usually a house or location where residual energy remains of the people who lived there or of the events that occurred there. But can this residual energy exist in some other form? Can there, perhaps, be something that occurs on the same day, in the same location, with the same person, that other people tune into  as they enter the place?

I drove back to Orlando with Megan so that our dog and I could surprise Rob when he returned from Minneapolis. Megan and I got there early Monday afternoon and she had dogs to walk. So we unloaded our stuff, got Noah and Nika, her dog, into the house, then she left to tend to her dog clients and I walked over to the Panera Bread to get us some lunch.

The walk is pleasant, along two cobblestone roads, through a charming Orlando neighborhood shaded with trees and lined with older homes. The weather was perfect – high 70s, not much humidity, and I was in a great mood.

Panera is something of an anomaly in my book – a fast-food place that features fresh, delicious meals. I nearly always order the same thing – You Pick 2, $6.99, a bowl of broccoli cheddar soup and the Greek salad.

When I got there that afternoon the lunch crowd had come and gone. It was probably around 2:30. One man was in front of me. I usually scan the menu on the wall just in case something new and delectable has been added to the choices, but decided to buy my usual. Megan’s usual is the broccoli cheddar soup in a bread bowl. So I get to the cashier, a cute little thing with a big smile.

“So what would you like?” she asked.

“The You Pick 2.” And right then before I ordered the soup, I experienced a distinct clicking sound in my head. It’s the only way I can describe it. I felt as if I had dived head first through that opening in the wave at the top of the post and into another dimension or level of reality. I blurted, “Chocolate cheddar soup…”

The cashier’s eyes widened with surprise. “Oh my God,” she murmured. “I can’t believe you said that.”

Yeah, well, I couldn’t believe it, either. I mean, c’mon. Chocolate cheddar soup?

“You’re like the fourteenth person who has said that to me today,” she went on. “How weird is that,  right?”

You have no idea just how weird, I thought, and walked back to Megan’s place with our lunch order, puzzling over what had happened.

So you’re a cashier at Panera Bread who, during the course of your shift, wait on scores of customers. But during your shift, fourteen people make the same mistake when referring to broccoli cheddar soup and call it chocolate cheddar soup. Maybe you don’t really take notice until it happens three or four times – a cluster – and now you’re keeping track, as this cashier did.

Later that evening, Rob, Megan and I walked to a place downtown for a bite to eat and started talking, as we often do, about the weird stuff that we’d experienced in the last few days. My Panera Bread experience seemed pretty lame in light of their stories – which I’ll try to explain in subsequent posts. But I think that Megan nailed it when she said, “Wow, Mom, so you walked into that chocolate cheddar soup vibration, picked up on it, and ordered it.”

Residual energy, like a haunted house, I thought.

The clincher for me was when Megan asked if I’d seen the wave painting she’d done recently and had put up on her bedroom wall. I had seen it on Facebook, but not in person, and hurried into her bedroom. The second I saw that wave, I knew I now had a visual depiction of what I’d experienced at Panera Bread. That hole in the wave was my multidimensional portal.