How To Get Haunted

 Or maybe this should be "how to haunt somebody." It's a "Concept of a Plan."

I was joking with a friend online earlier that I've never actually met in person, and who's now in hospice, about seeing my crocus when they bloom this next spring. It started with a notation by me that now that the snow had again melted, the tips of last fall's crocus bulbs were poking through the dirt by between a  quarter and eighth of an inch, and really needed snow again to protect them with the expected sub-zero weather coming up. He replied with the assumption that they would be yellow, to which I countered with a list of all the colors I had ordered them in, some of which I'd never seen in a crocus before, like orange or blue.

Both of us know he won't be leaving Arizona for Minnesota to see them in bloom. It's not necessarily his expected life span, as he's been holding on for a nice while now. Even my dad hung in there with official hospice status for eleven months, and I've heard of both longer and shorter stays by different folks.  In his case not traveling that far is guaranteed by his health concerns and difficulty in any mobility. Travel of any sort isn't happening. I'm not sure he even makes it to see his doctor, as a nurse pops in to visit him regularly. The nurse is the go-between for things like a change in medications, in addition to tending immediate needs.  Anyway, he's already been sticking around for longer than he initially expected. The positive is his mind is sound, he spends time researching a specific climate change topic, and he still has - at least occasionally - his sense of humor. Some days it's rare, but it hasn't fully deserted him.

I told him that we wouldn't know till April the actual colors the crocus the crocus would bloom in. But then, a few practicalities occurred to me, and I shared those with him.

"We'll have to see what's left from what the squirrels dug up to eat. This means, of course, to find out you have to stick around till April.  : ) That, or figure out how to haunt me as a ghost. So-o-o... first you have to believe you can be a ghost, then manifest as one, then figure out that you'd want to bother with haunting anybody, then whether that might be me, then figure out how to find somebody you've never met.... I suppose there's a part in there where  you'd have to decide if it's worth all that energy! LOL "

His answer was prompt:  "Cute, me a ghost? Why not? :-))) "

I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile I expect we'll continue to correspond almost daily, sharing thoughts about the world, politics, climate, personal history and experiences, philosophies about life and death and what has meaning, etc. We'll continue till it can't.