Orion and Five Foot Two Eyes of Blue

Years ago, the morning after Grama died her body was picked up by a hearse. I couldn’t bring myself to witness this, so I traveled an hour away to Lexington where a psychic fair was happening.

I got there about the same time that Grama was being taken out of her home. I would have just fallen apart if I’d been there. I was told that as they wheeled her past the living room my grampa was playing ‘Five Foot Two eyes of Blue’ on the piano, a song she would sing along to during life. She was about five foot two with blue eyes, she would sing it with him. It was their song. They raised me, it was my childhood home. This was such a poignant and powerful moment in time for him to play this song. Their children witnessed. I couldn’t bear it.

Having grown up with them in that house listening to grampa play the piano and grama sing within that very environment all those years, I am glad I I drove to the Psychic Fair in Lexington that day. I cry every time I think about it anyway.

At the psychic fair I entered a large carpeted room full of tables. Some were loaded up with interesting candles and jewelry, or artwork and other services, and some had actual live psychic readers sitting at them.

I circled the outskirts of all the tables, attempting to find some sign from spirit that would draw me closer to a particular psychic. I finally decided on a man named Orion because he had piercing blue eyes and an interesting southern drawl.

When he first began, he talked about my eventually having a job from my computer. I didn’t know what he could have been talking about, but later I began working for Keen.com as a freelance tarot reader.

Suddenly he stopped and cocked his head to the side. I was glad he was taping this because I couldn’t believe what he began to say.

“Who is Talia, T-a- l?”

I opened my mouth to answer but he went on before I could speak. (The name Tallmadge was my grandparent’s last name!)

“A woman is here, no taller than five foot two, blue eyes . . . she’s your grandmother!”

I only could nod my head, “Yes!”

“Recently deceased,” he continued. “She is holding a canister of coins and shaking it. Does this mean anything to you?”

It sure did! All of the bicentennial coins I’d exchanged with her over the years, she saved in a white canister. I would give her a bicentennial that I happened across, she would trade me a regular one for it.

I told Orion that he was communicating with my grandma who had died ‘yesterday’.

He expressed surprise at how quickly she came through for him. He told me it takes a while after physical death, months even, to receive such a strong impression from someone who’d passed over.

“Why do I smell . . . cinnamon?”

I told him how we’d boil cinnamon for house aroma during her last days.

He began to describe the person who had met her at death, a rugged looking “Uncle on her level” he said.

“He came down a hill from farmland that looked a lot like KY farmland, and he was driving a very special truck that you will find in a family photo album. An old truck with pieces of wood down each side of the truck bed. He picked her up in this truck and drove off, up a hill”

I didn’t really know what he was talking about regarding her uncle, but the tape was going and I would listen to it later with family who may know.

“She tells me she had ‘all her ducks in a row’ and she is smiling.” He said

(This is a phrase she used with her son just before her death).

“I see her holding a container like a bowl and throwing flower out. Just tossing flower around.”

I immediately assumed this was a message to me that she wanted us to hurry and spread her ashes at the water falls, as she’d asked.

She is saying to you, “Indian drum.”

This also had meaning to me, as I work as a shamanic practitioner and do much work with a drum.

I asked two friends who had driven with me there to smell me, possibly the shower I took that morning hadn’t washed off a smell of cinnamon from my hair?

I wore fresh clothes and vanilla musk, and my friends could only detect the scents of pert shampoo and vanilla musk.

I was excited to share the tape with family, and I rushed madly through traffic back to Berea. Most of my out of state relatives were still there at her house. When I entered the house, all of them were gathered in the living room.

We played the tape right away, and I knew that most family present were very skeptical of psychic readings. But there were a few moments when everyone was surprised at the content. I was even accused of knowing Orion prior to the reading, when in actuality I’d never seen the man before.

He’d seen “Talia”, the beginning of our family name; cinnamon, ‘ducks in a row’ and the canister of coins. He’d seen her uncle and his truck, my Indian drum and her desire to be cremated.

The uncle he spoke of was an Uncle Rodge who she’d lived with for a time, and he owned a truck everyone referred to as ‘thundering Ann’. I didn’t know this, but the older cousins remembered right away.

We paused the taped and went straight to her family albums where my cousins found an image of an old black and white sketch of Thundering Ann. It had wooden beams down the sides of the bed and a 40’s style body, just as Orion said it did.

Grandpa listened to the tape several times and then typed each word Orion said, to study them more closely. He called me once in a while afterwards, to discuss a new thought he had from the reading. It comforted us to have the reading.

“She was throwing flower, she wants us to scatter her ashes.” He commented.

He also wanted me to take the canister of coins.

I’m glad to have them.

May the light of your soul guide you and bless the work that you do!

Namaste’

Love Fawn