Ghost Story #25

When I was 25, my boyfriend & I had just moved from Oakland, CA to Santa Fe, NM. 
Living in a station wagon, on the back roads of the high desert while looking for a house. 
We’d take a ‘spit­-bath’ in the lobby bathrooms of the La Fonda Hotel, off of the square. 
We got to shower proper & cook at a pal’s from time to time as well. But it totally sucked. 
Break up the days, with a drive out of town, stopping to wander an abandoned building.
A favorite hobby of ours, that we’d enjoyed on our cross country road treks the last couple of years. 
We found a lot of animal skulls; cat, dog, coyote, mouse & other assorted bones. 
I only recently gave up the many jars worth of my collection. 
I still have a few.After a month or so, we finally found a four room duplex in a cul­de­sac. 
Making fruit crate altars, using the skulls & bones that we’d found.Some of those very items made their way into my small assemblage art many years later. Oh, the young uprooted artists. 
We loved hard & fought harder.Maybe it was the bad feng shui of the place; that old section of town; the hippie ­witch that lived there before; the many bones we brought into the house; our own angsty artist vibes? There was definitely an unease, it always felt like someone was in the next room. 
(Or at the kitchen window) We would have to stop whatever it was we were doing to investigate the sounds. Maybe the cats? Sleeping. Okay then, just the ghosts, teasing the new tenants. For a year.

photo by Geoff Johnson