A Long Lost Frequency

A Long Lost Frequency 

“It’s raining baby spiders outside,” Teena Gerberson exclaimed into her phone to her brother, Tommy. She stood in wonder another few moments, looking up at the wooden rafters that enclosed her front door while several teensy spiders ballooned all around her. A few landed on her white nylon running jacket. Then another one landed on her arm. She tried to cup it to keep it safe and dropped her phone.

“Tommy, hold on a sec while I get the babies somewhere safe,” she shouted down to her phone and she could hear Tommy laughing back at her. He knew his sister well. 

A few moments later she was back. She unlocked the door wide with one hand, tossed the keys on the console in the entrance foyer then bent down to pick up the phone. “I can’t believe it! There were a few teensy spiders yesterday, but today they are legion.” 

Teena loved spiders. Years ago, someone she knew had told her that saving spiders brought good karma. And even though she hadn’t believed in karma at the time and thought it was all stupid, she had begun to save spiders at every opportunity. By now, it had become a kind of devotional practice.  Even the scariest looking spiders that appeared in her home in the autumn looking for winter lodgings, she made herself capture and put outside unscathed. The scary ones, though, she made sure to release far away from the house. 

If there were a god of the spiders, Teena figured, by now she was on its good side. 

“Just back from my morning run around the lake, Tommy,” she said, as she walked into the kitchen.  She switched on the coffeemaker, then sat down on a stool to wait for it. “So how are you enjoying Santa Barbara? And what’s up with mom?” 

Tommy was out visiting their mother, Martina, who had married a Californian named Fred in her early fifties and moved across country to live with him, leaving her kids from her first marriage back east. There she had remained happily, living in his beautiful house with its magnificent ocean view, even after he had passed on ten years back.  

“Santa Barbara is still beautiful,” said Tommy, and paused. “Mom. Well, that’s a different story. She’s’s not her old vital self. She misses Fred dearly. And she misses us. To tell you the truth, Teenie, I’m worried. More worried than I thought I would be. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something is wrong. I think you should push up your travel plans and come this week instead of next. She’ll be so thrilled to see you.” 

“I wasn’t expecting that at all,” said Teena. “Wow.” She poured herself a cup of coffee, then went and sat down on the dark blue velvet armchair.  Kicking off her running shoes, she peeled off her sweaty socks, then placed her feet up on the ottoman. Teena took a sip of hot coffee. “Okay, Tommy, I hear you loud and clear. I’ll make a reservation this morning.  First let me finish my coffee and take a shower, then I’ll see what flights are available in the next few days.”  

“Good, I’ll call you back in a few hours after my run and we can plan out your trip.”  

An hour later, Teena finally managed to sit down at her desk, with her hands molded around her second cup of coffee.  

Outside her office window, illumined by the late morning sky, the trees were making their last brave display of intense color before winter arrived; and all the reds and oranges and yellows died off into a mass of undifferentiated brown, gray and tan.  Muted and gone into hibernation for months.  

Wind whistled suddenly through the house and Tina shivered before drawing her cashmere shawl around her shoulders.  Days like this, the heating in her old farmhouse never quite came up to snuff. Even though it wasn’t cold, she could feel the chill of mid-autumn and it made her crave hot soup. She would have to look through her fridge later to see what she could scrounge up for dinner.

Then she put on headphones and opened her phone app to play binaural beats that would stimulate deep creativity.  As the alpha brainwaves carried her away, Teena began to write.  

For a few hours, the writing poured out, gloriously self-directed, a long rush of perfect flow.  But then, out of nowhere, a state of deep anxiety began to creep into her body, like a long-lost frequency. It felt recognizable but odd.  

Teena sat up straight, took another sip of coffee, now chilled, like the room around her.  “Why?” she said aloud.  “Why now, when everything was going perfectly.  It doesn’t even make sense.”  Teena put her head in her hands, breathing in and exhaling more slowly, as she had been taught, in order to release stress. But the feeling of anxiety lingered.  “Why?” she thought. She loathed feeling this way.  From bliss to anxiety for no reason she could discern.  

Was there something wrong with her? 

Where had this anxiety come from? She didn’t know. 

After a while, she got up and stood before the window.  The wind had ceased and the sky was now a deep, crystalline blue.  Luminous, limitless.  And hanging from the rafters outside the window, subtly gleaming in the diffuse light, there was a perfect spider web.  Its spider lay within, bloated with an egg sac she would soon release.  Soon after, the mother spider would die.  And the hatching babies would feed off of their own sac until they were able to launch silken threads that the wind would balloon away. 

Cycle of life.  

Teena took a few more deep breaths as the anxiety lessened. Nature always grounded her, even spiders. That’s probably why she kept saving them.  

Teena thought of her own mother then. She had scheduled her flight for two days hence.  Tommy was probably overreacting. He had always been the sensitive one, but better go out there and check in on mom just in case.  

Then the sky beckoned again with its beauty, shifting her attention back to metaphysical realms.  She sat down with her cold coffee and contemplated the purity of the air, the unblocked access to light.  Light, she thought to herself, is both a particle and a wave.  And in space, light waves become pure kinetic energy, traveling uninhibited through the ether.  

The phone rang.  She ignored it until her brother’s voice came on the answering machine.  “Teenie,” he said.  “Please pick up.”  There was a note in his voice.  So she did. 

“Are you sitting,” he said.  Then he continued before she could reply.  “I’m just back from my run.”  

“Yeah,” she said. “You told me you would call me back after you finished. So my flight will get in…”   

“It’s not important now,” he said and his voice hung, straight off a cliff.  “Mom’s dead, Teenie. I know I told you she was all right. And I thought she was.  So I went for my run. She just slipped away in her chair by the window. I can’t believe it,” he said. “I think I’m in shock.”

She said nothing.  

“I can’t believe it,” he said again. “I feel terrible. She went with neither of us there.” And Tommy began to sob.  Harsh and discordant.  

Teena sat silent and contemplated the luminescent sky. And what is a soul, she thought, but light embodied. And then set free.  Free, like mom’s soul now was, disembodied and able to travel wheresoever it wished.  

No,” she told Tommy.  “It’s all right.  Mom wasn’t alone on her final journey. She was here with me.”

And Teena, too, began to sob.