November 2026 Flash💥Devos ~ Thank You!

Thanks to all my readers, listeners, and those who’ve wandered by to pray with me through Flash💥Devos these past few months. I offer you this gift of a walk-along with me on a visit to the town where I grew up and how I found perspective among its buried and living treasures.Goodbye to that Holy Ghostby Marianne Abel-LipschutzI said goodbye to a lot more than my Aunt Mary Jane when I attended her funeral in the west Chicago suburb where I grew up. She was 92, and had died on October 1st after having spent several years in a nursing home following Uncle Joe’s death in 2017. I hadn’t visited Glen Ellyn in twenty years. From hearing the Chicago & Northwestern train whistles on the incoming ride to passing the Seven Dwarfs Restaurant (for the best banana splits after swim team practice) on the way out, the 36-hour visit surprised me by refashioning my past.Mary Jane was a mythical pixie dynamo affectionately called Bebe who shepherded eight children into adulthood. She and my Uncle Joe had moved from New Jersey to Glen Ellyn in 1963 to be near our family with (eventually) five kids where we could all live happily ever after. Unexpectedly in 1965, my father accepted a transfer to Belgium for four years, and then to suburban Philadelphia. No one in my family ever lived in Glen Ellyn again. We became “those who move on.”Glen Ellyn’s gorgeous trees lit up every street that autumn--birch, every kind of oak, Eastern white pine, walnut, firs, junipers, cottonwood. Box elder, black maple, silver maple, and sugar maple are native to DuPage County. At the last tree census in 2020, the county tallied over 19 million trees, 21 times more trees than people.This protective canopy surrounds my strongest memories, along with the black silty clay loam of our yard, turquoise waves in the swim club pool, and afternoons crouched in the sumac thickets watching our pennies flatten on the railroad tracks when trains roared past. And peonies. I remembered how my mother’s luscious magenta peonies shook their tight fists in the wind before dancing like Byzantine jewels in our garden’s hot June glow.***Driving toward my cousin’s house, I passed Main Street School where I attended kindergarten, now a vibrant community center. We lived for a decade at 248 Crest Road six blocks away. Our street was blocked for resurfacing, so I parked and walked into an eerie hologram of the past. As kids, the concrete sidewalk paved our way around the world. I didn’t recognize many locations until I walked by them because we’d left Glen Ellyn before I drove cars.What was once our foursquare Georgian home looked externally the same but the linden tree in the front yard had been cut down long enough ago that only the stump remained as a dent in the grass. The flagstone knee-wall along the neighbor’s driveway that propped us up for games of marbles had disappeared. Wrinkles and puckers marked the deteriorated asphalt alongside our old yard. I chose not to strike up a conversation with a woman who hustled packages from the screen door into her SUV, clearly in a hurry.I was not in any hurry at all. Anonymous on the sidewalk, I relished my detachment. I felt no triggers whatsoever. No desire to enter the house, talk to the residents, or wander the yard--affirming years of therapy that had effectively deactivated the traumas that had occurred in that building. I felt clean and clear and wildly entertained by a preposterous seasonal spectacle that filled the front yard.Many neighbors still competed with garish Halloween decorations that revealed the sinister side of suburbia. Gigantic skeletons, gravestones with rhyming couplets, supersize wooly-legged spiders clamped over front doors, and spooky witches with broomsticks strung through tree limbs reflected the nightmares some kids experienced inside their homes. Inflatable goons tossed in the breeze, shaking the laughter out of me like a howl rising from the deep.Skulls tucked under the lime-green Mophead Hydrangeas scoffed, too. Three life-sized sorcerers tended a cauldron in front of the dining room window. A cheerleader skeleton doing splits bobbed her Golden Eagles pompoms in the breeze, next to bone-white flamingoes, hideous gargoyles, and body parts sticking out of the dirt.As a young girl, I’d had a recurring dream of evading the hard things inside our home by flying up into the air like Casper the Friendly Ghost in my Saturday morning cartoons. Then I’d dart underground where I’d be safe (albeit buried alive). Now I laughed out loud at that lawn littered with death as if my past had finally breached daylight.One plastic headstone read, “Dear Departed Brother Dave. He chased a bear into a cave.” The current homeowners had no clue how uncannily well that metaphor fit what had actually happened with our older brother David. One younger brother,