Free Lily Dale by Christine Wicker

laughing,” she said.
    She and a gray-haired former nun named Mary Ockuly often greet each other by bumping hips. Once when we were standing with medium Sherry Lee Calkins and her two grandchildren, the adults were discussing an upcoming musical performance. As Shelley stood to the side with the kids, I noticed all three swinging their arms, clapping in front of their bodies and then clapping in back, just idly swinging and clapping. Not saying a word, just entertaining themselves.
    The nine-bedroom Victorian house had no rules as far as I could tell, except that you had to strip your bed of the sheets and pillowcases before you left and remake it with a set of sheets from the closet. At one time a sign on the back door outlawed any talk of negative things, but Shelley took the sign down when it wasn’t needed anymore. Now a sign says, T HIS HOUSE IS PROTECTED BY ANGELS .
    Anybody can smoke cigarettes in Shelley’s house, and most people do. Profanity is completely accepted. A favorite Takei story is of the time their older daughter returned from a school that teaches healing and mediumship and threw herself over the sofa, groaning.
    Her brother Quinn asked, “What’s wrong? Too spiritual?”
    â€œToo much fucking love,” she yelled.
    The only word that ever ruffles Shelley in the least is should.
    â€œThere are no shoulds in Lily Dale,” she told me, cigarette in hand, feet propped on the kitchen bar.
    Shelley likes to think of her house as a salon where women come every summer to discuss ways their lives have been touchedby the eternal. Women can say things there they’ve never said before, tell stories that would cause the rest of the world to call them insane, and talk as long as they want. That’s all anyone does. They rarely clean house or cook. They rarely read and only occasionally watch television. They talk for hours, for days, for weeks, and nobody ever runs out of things to talk about.
    In any given week, the house may contain women telling any number of strange stories. Mary Ann Spears, a therapist who sees dead relatives of her grieving clients, might be in town, or C. J., who was color-blind until she came to Lily Dale.
    â€œWould you like to talk with C. J.?” Shelley asked. “The last I heard she was outside the gift shop. She saw the color blue and started following it. I’ll have to see if I can find her.”
    I talked to C. J., who confirmed the story. She now sees color whenever she comes to Lily Dale. The ability lasts for some time after she leaves the community and then gradually fades away.
    Lorie might also be in town. She’s a therapist for autistic children and perhaps the most spiritual person Shelley knows, Shelley told me. One of the first questions Lorie asked Shelley about Lily Dale was, “Why do they have artificial flowers?”
    Lots of yards have tattered plastic flowers stuck into weathered old vases, and Lorie couldn’t understand why a place that claims so much spirit power wouldn’t be able to conjure up enough real blooms to go around. A quiet, often solemn, woman who has never had much money and has never seemed to care, Lorie told me that one morning well before dawn she was walking down the hill after milking the cow her family owned when she saw a blazing light coming from the window of her toddler son’s upstairs room.
    Thinking the house was on fire, she dropped the milk pails and began running toward the house. Streaks of white light continued shooting out of her son’s room. It looked like lightning, but the sky was clear. When she entered the bedroom, her son was standing inhis crib, jumping up and down, yelling, “Light. Light.” But the room was perfectly safe and normal and dark, no fire, no light, and no evidence of anything like that.
    Emmie Chetkin, reputedly the richest woman in Lily Dale and certainly the most powerful personality, is also a friend of Shelley’s.