The Monster in my Garden

My actual garden at our home in St. Croix.

Do you believe in monsters? Because lately, I've had this nagging feeling that there's something bad out there. Just out of reach. Watching. Lurking. Ready to pounce. 

I don't think it's really there...But it could be. It's like the monsters you believe are under the bed, in your closet, or in my case, an evil being standing behind me that I get a glimpse of in the bathroom mirror just as I'm stooping over to wash my face.

I am quite intuitive. I'm an empath and believe me, I know your pain. I get sympathy cramps, headaches and nausea. I can't watch particularly violent movies because I can feel each blow from the hammer or the bullet tearing through flesh and bone. I also retain sadness or confusion and pain from people I know and love.

And with that said, you should also know that I have a record of  "feeling" when something is a good idea or bad. If I'm particularly hysterical, you better listen. My feelings are never wrong. I have insisted on cancelling plans or giving my wholehearted "OK!" to random invitations based on them. My kids (and husband) think I know the future, or can predict it, but that's not really how this works.

What I get are signs that I can read efficiently. Or sometimes I get a warm feeling of love or cold feeling of evil that I respond to appropriately and adamantly. On occasion, I've had words enter my mind that give me a complete thought, lets me KNOW something without me garnering any facts. I say that words come to me because the sentence is not vocalized. I don't hear a voice, I kind of "see" the sentence. Some call it intuition, but I think it's something more tenable. I think it's being in-tune with the universe.

While living in St. Croix, I've learned to identify when a hummingbird will come by our porch. I hear the whir of its wings at a distance and as it gets louder, the sound arriving before the actual bird appears, the buzz is the "tell," like in poker.

Well, I am getting that "tell" right now. For me, it is a darkness, a hollow inside me that says to me there is something to fear. It's particularly strong lately and so I look for it to manifest in physical things.

During the day, after my husband leaves for work, I have about seven hours to myself. I can do whatever I want. Sure, sometimes I want to change the sheets, do laundry, sweep, but most days, I am free to read, write, journal, post on FB, take pictures of our garden, walk, pet and feed our dog, Dorothy, whatever.

Dorothy is our Foster Fail. We were only going to care for her for a few days but when I identified so strongly with this shy, wary, scared dog who had been abandoned twice, I couldn't let her go.

Dorothy is skittish, afraid of most men, jumps at loud noises, is tentative and ever vigilant. We don't know what she had to endure during the hurricanes of 2017, but she retains her cautiousness, insecurity, fear.

In our garden, where Dorothy and I wander during the day, I notice that she also looks for "evil". The other day, she stuck her small short snout under some plants and quickly backed away snarling, frightened. I brace myself, expecting to find a snake, one of the few hundred pets illegally brought to the island and even worse, released into the wild. But no, it was just a hermit crab. Just a cute crustacean oblivious to either Dorothy or me.

Another day, she explored a portion of the garden I couldn't reach because of the overgrown brush. I started to walk over toward her to make sure she was OK, when she came tearing up the driveway with her tail between her legs. Turned out she had gotten stung by a wasp, there were so many, it's a wonder neither of us had been stung more often. She spent the afternoon licking the spot, I of course, sympathized and could almost feel her pain.

Like Dorothy, I confront these things that could cause me harm. I peer into the dark crevices and cracks of the retaining wall that surrounds our property. I search the branches of the mango, Ginger Thomas and date palm trees in our yard. I focus on the vines wrapping their way up and around hibiscus branches. What I'm looking for, I don't know. But I expect to find an iguana, the size of King Kong, just waiting to lunge at me; a python dangling from above, ready to drop on me; a monster, never before seen or named, ready to bite, claw, and eat me whole.

But instead, I witness rainbows arching overhead. I see flowers like little paper lanterns dangling flirtatiously. I find lizards so tiny they don't make a sound or bow the leaf they have just clambered over. And lately, there are the hummingbirds, spunky speed demons that hover inches from my face questioning my existence. Some buzz past me, so close my hair flies up from the wind their whirling wings have generated.

My conscious self knows my fear is not out there, but within. I think I'm afraid of committing to this life in St. Croix. I'm afraid that this new found belief that I'll have a forever home with Peter is scary because I'm afraid I'll do something to lose it. I'm afraid I will give myself over to my writing and be disappointed with what I find. That I'll think I'll get my book published. That I'll want that and it won't happen.

But why? Why be afraid of any or all of those things? I'm enjoying the life here, the life with Peter has never been better, the writing and the idea of being read is exciting. Maybe it's time to realize the "thing that is bad" isn't really there and put the fear where it belongs, categorized as mythical, illusionary, ephemeral, unlike these hummingbirds and rainbows that I keep finding.

But then, I've lived with this monster, this evil, this fear since I was little, since I was four. And while that abandoned girl has been brought out of the crevices. She's been identified and named. She has not been banished from our garden. She lies dormant, lurking, waiting to pounce. Like the whir of the hummingbirds' wings, I must learn to see her coming before she actually appears.