A shandi story

Last night it was thundering and lightening so getting on the computer was out of the question. As Brenda and I sat around visiting, Shandi joined up. We were sitting out front enjoying the cool night air following the first round of rain, when the wind blew strong enough to cause rain droplets to fall from the trees across the road. It was a dark night, so the sound was all one had to go on. Shandi jumped and looking across toward the trees that border the road, she says, “I don’t like that sound. It scares me. I always think it’s a big monster out in the woods and it’s coming to eat me up.”
I explained to her the real source of the noise, but she wasn’t truly listening, as she immediately launched into a tale of a movie she had watched. From her descriptions the movie was Sleep Hollow, and complete with physical animation, she told us all about the movie. There was the evil man with the hood, the girl who always did something strange—that point I missed totally, and the man who walked around never looking where he was going because he was always reading a book.
She tells her story in high animation, with facial expressions to match the scene; the physical motions to describe the actions and lots of descriptive phrases. She’s really a trip to watch and listen to, but you have to listen closely because she talks a mile a minute when she’s into telling a story.
Then she proceeded to tell us that there really were evil spirits and good spirits. “Don’t you believe that, momo?” she asked me. “Don’t you believe the evil spirits want to hurt you and the good spirits protect you? I do. You know my uncle Bobby, the one that died, (speaking of Brenda’s husband) he’s my good spirit. He is always with me and he keeps me safe. He even comes in the form of animals, momo.”
So we discussed that possibility for a while until she began to talk about a time when it rained so much that the football field at school was flooded. She told about her and a friend trying to figure out where that water was going. Why it was covering the football field, so much that the football players had to take off at least 3 days from playing football, as she described it. I suggested that the rain water soaked into the ground and what didn’t soak in or run off, evaporated. “No way” Shandi says emphatically. “Me and my friend searched until we found where that water was going. You know those ditches way over by the trees—referring to a small creek that runs on one 2 sides of the field—why that water just run off into those ditches and disampeared.”
From that story she really got deep, when she remembered showing Carson, a school friend, the secret path down at the water park. They were all bent over looking at the path, when Carson began to scratch in the sand, throwing sand on Shandi. She asked him to quit but instead, he dug faster so she used the stick in her hand and in her own words, “she just went lost out of her mind and hit him with the stick”. “But I apologized to him, momo, but he wouldn’t listen.” She said.
I asked her when does she usually get lost out of her mind and she said when she got really mad. “That’s when the evil Shandi appears.”
“The evil Shandi?” I asked.
“Yes, the evil Shandi, momo”.
I told her that I thought that was simply the angry Shandi and it was what we worked on learning how to handle our anger properly. She lets out this exasperated sigh and states,”You call it what you want, momo, I call it evil Shandi.”
“But, I have a good Shandi too. When evil Shandi isn’t out, good Shandi is. Do you know that Britanny says there is a boy Shandi? There is no such thing. There is only one Shandi and it’s ME. But, maybe my mama had a boy Shandi in her tummy, and he got dead before he was born, so it was only me, Shandi, who come out of my mommy’s tummy. Could that be right, momo?” She asked.
Well, no, darling, it couldn’t be right, I explained to her. Mommy only had you.
Eventually she accepted that truth, but I’m still not sure she was convinced. With that, as is usual with Shandi, she stopped talking.
Today their father came and got them around 9, to spend time with them. He planned to take them to a park to play, then have a cook out. He managed to tell me without Ana hearing that this would be her surprise birthday party since he would be at work the 27th, which is her birthday.