boughs to a castle, a ship, a safe house for spies.
Children are close to secret worlds and readily embrace literature that explores them. For many of us, this fascination stays with us throughout our lives. We flock with our children to Harry Potter and Platform 9 ¾. You have any number of TV shows geared toward adults such as the Stargate franchise with the major plot device being – you guessed it – a large gate to other worlds. Once Upon a Time transports all the fairy tale creatures into our world of Storybrook, Maine along with a curse robbing them of their original memories. Only one woman is able to break the curse and unsurprisingly, she is an outsider [or is she]. Since 1963, twelve different actors have played Dr. Who in a more or less continuous series so the interest is there. Meanwhile, the portal, the Tardis, has stayed the same [the exterior anyway].
There is one portal many of us don’t care to consider too closely; the ultimate portal that awaits us all. Death. We don’t know for certain the land that lies beyond this one but we speculate, a lot. The spirituality and religious sections of bookstores are filled with quite a few books about glimpses of the after-life from those who have been there and back. During the ancient Gaelic festival, Samhain, [which evolved into Halloween], it was believed
that the fabric between our world and the after-life was the thinnest, when communication with departed loved ones the most likely. So in this case, it is a specific time, not a location, which is the portal. I wonder if my increased interest in portals has been triggered by the death of my parents and the expectation that I will precede my daughter to the grave. It is a small pain to consider that I will miss a big chunk of her life and an odd comfort to imagine a yearly holiday when I might get caught up on the events of her life.
Down the Rabbit Hole to Narnia
Large Disaster
Photograph By Lissy Laricchia