Psychic abilities - or, the ability some individuals claim to have to gather knowledge and insight from the world around them by use of their mind alone, i.e. not from conventional senses like taste, sight, hearing, smell, and touch - might be something I would not invest belief in if I didn't have somebody close to me who indeed had this ability. My mother cannot predict the future or read your mind; no, her ability is unique. I know of no other who claims to have this particular talent:
She has an uncanny ability to find things.
The origin of this talent goes like this: my mother was one of those rare students who loved school. It was quite traumatizing for her one morning when my grandmother could not find the keys to the car to drive her to school. According to my mom, while in the bathroom, she bent her head down and prayed to God to help her find the keys. A voice came to her and told her that the keys were on the clothes washer. And that, it turns out, is exactly where the keys were.
Whether or not she actually still prays to God is unclear. I know from personal observance of this ability that she quietly bends her head down for several seconds, raises it up, and makes a perfect bee line straight to the lost object. I observed her finding keys once. My stepfather's brother was down in the unkempt field behind our house and dropped his keys somewhere amidst the tall grass. He could only narrow the area of where his keys possibly were to roughly an acre of land. My mother did her thing, walked straight down the field, bent down, and picked them up. Amazed, he took his keys back. In another instance, this one probably the most amazing that I'd ever witnessed, my little sister lost the back of an ear ring in a pea gravel playground at school. What do you suppose the odds are of ever finding such an object in an environment such as that without a metal detector? In what may have been the ultimate test of her abilities, my mother took us all down to that playground on a Saturday morning when no other kids were there. As always, she bent her head down, raised it up, and walked straight into that pea gravel playground. Once there she immediately plunged her hand into the gravel, and when she brought it back up, in between her thumb and forefinger, was that tiny, metal ear ring backing.
Other paranormal claims on the part of my mother that I cannot verify was the time she saw a UFO and that she sometimes has premonitions in dreams. While I can't really confirm these (although she says I was there to see the large spacecraft but I was a small child and I probably don't remember it) it does lend credence to my mother's apparent touch for the supernatural.
Whether or not you want to attribute my mother's uncanny knack of finding things to psychic abilities or divine intervention is up to you. I am merely reporting to you what I have personally seen, plus the anecdotal account of my mother of where it started. I, for one, do in fact believe, at least in this context, that I have a psychic mom.
A few of you oh-so-clever softlinkers seem to be suggesting that I am attempting to use this little node here about my mom to prove psychic abilities the world over. That is not my intention at all. I am merely sharing some of my unusual experiences with you and I think it is interesting because I've never seen any accounts quite like this anywhere, this ability to find objects so easily and accurately. Believe it or don't believe it, I don't care. I don't expect everybody to believe it. Excuse me for trying to provide fellow noders with a little nonfiction entertainment.