Back to Normal.. Well.. Normal for Me

The other night as I was driving back from the store, I took a different route than usual. There's a road that passes sort of up over town that runs adjacent to the one I live on, which eventually leads to a campground then on to an old, semi-abandoned cemetary. I take this route when I want to avoid the mini traffic jams that flare up in front of the diner during meal times.

On this particular evening, it was still light out, but the air had cooled considerably and it was easy to allow my mind to wander. An image flashed in my mind, of a horse. If you've read here before you know it's not unusual for this to happen, but this wasn't like the other times. This horse was very well groomed and was dressed in tack to pull a wagon. He seemed out of place here, I sensed he existed somewhere else. I viewed the animal from behind, as if I were sitting up high driving him and the wagon he was pulling. It took a second, but I soon realized that the wagon he was pulling carried a casket. He was heading to the old cemetary.

I didn't give it a lot of thought at the time. Ma had told me stories of how the old cemetary is so far up the mountain and off the beaten path that in the old days, the only way to carry a casket up there was by horse and wagon. I assumed I had been influenced by those stories.

A few days later I was standing outside at work, trying to find a moment of peace away from the hammering and whirring of machines inside, when it happened again. This time, I saw the same horse, a large black draft with white socks and blaze pulling a funeral wagon. I noticed that the metal on his harness was polished to such a shine that it glowed. This wasn't some Frog Pond Holler field horse. The wagon itself wasn't of the kind you'd expect to see around here. It was very ornate, beautiful, used only for such occasions. I shook it off, then I thought about the direction I'd seen the horse travelling this time, along a path that lies to one side of the property, which used to be a road and leads up the mountain to an old family cemetary.

Later that day I saw the same image, maybe it was because I'd been thinking about it, I'll admit. This time the scene was the same, only he was in a city where the streets were lined with mourners. He was being lead by a man in a formal suit walking along side him. I remember specifically that the man wore white gloves. The day was gray, rainy, the wind whipping.

I sensed that this happened far from here, outside of the U.S. I don't know if it's meant to be the future, past or present. I don't think I knew the person his wagon carried, I felt no sense of sadness other than I normally would when seeing the funeral of someone I didn't know pass by. I've never been to a funeral with a horse drawn wagon, although I've probably seen one on television. Kennedy's funeral had one didn't it? That happened before I was born, but I think I've seen film clips of it before.

Heck I don't know. We can just chalk it up to my regularly scheduled weirdness.