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Adela got up and I accompanied her to the door.  As I paused for an instant, idly watching the street after she disappeared, my attention was suddenly drawn to the graveyard and I caught sight of a filmy white… thing… with a dark blue scarf… and I must confess, when I glanced in the mirror a minute later, I looked like I had seen a ghost.  But appearances are deceitful, as I told James Gregory.

What with the graveyard on the one hand, and Adela on the other, I really began to waste away those next few weeks.  I slept little and ate less.  Of course I do not believe in ghosts – certainly not – especially not ghosts from a “graveyard” where no one has been buried.  Still, it was not exactly canny to look up from your dinner table and see the long shadows of the tombstones trailing on the grass, or to wake in the middle of the night with a pervasive consciousness of unexplored mystery next door.  But Adela throve on it.

Continue reading “A Ghost, a Graveyard, and a Girlfriend – Part 2” →

It was James Gregory’s fate in life to have interesting neighbors.  I could never understand why, because James Gregory really wasn’t an interesting person himself.  Which was fine with me.  Interesting people are very well in their way, but my first would-be fiancé, the son of an Asian politician who had grown up in Estonia and become a private pilot, was too interesting.  The reaction from him lasted all my life and I was quite content to be Mrs. James Gregory and simply watch the interesting people from afar.

We lived in a small house, in a nice neighborhood of houses of a similar size.  We lived there twenty years, while interesting neighbors came and went… but none more interesting than Iakobo Ian.

Continue reading “A Ghost, a Graveyard, and a Girlfriend – Part 1” →