“I just don't think it happened that way,” he argued. “Otherwise, the ghost wouldn't still be hainting the tree.”

I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory luminous phenomena, photisms, to use the term of the psychologists.

One of the most influential acts of servanthood my parents displayed would be to invite strangers, or what I would call oddlings, to our house for a meal or to stay for a while. And these oddlings were people who were the most down and out — the broken, the depressed, the dirty, the lonely, the lost — and they all seemed to enter our house under a cloud of hopelessness.

spelted Beans