stress dreams

i'm standing against the strawberry box planters on the old ca patio, and there's a layer of white frost over the blackened brambles of our plants. the cherry tree from around the corner by the broken up concrete of yesteryear's porch has been moved just off the patio where the old thermometer was, and i wander over to it, see it just as withered as the strawberries. there are two blackened globes the size of roma tomatoes on it, and one wizened tomato that i pick and hold in my hand. it's red, in this dream world of greys.

there are no animals around, no people. it's just me and our porch area. the latticed patio looks like people were there just yesterday, and there's a tea cup on the ledge that supports the lattice at about mid-person height. it's cold. the old trough where we used to swim in summer, where we used to rescue young frogs swimming the breaststroke until death or salvation, it is filled with wrinkled leaves in grey and black. mostly black. i see beyond the storage sheds that the emu pen has no hay, but the fence nearby looks in good shape. i go to climb over the gate, but at my touch it falls. i tuck in the ends of my scarf and walk back over crunching gravel to the patio.

i cannot see the house, or any of our land beyond the house, but i know it's there. just not what my dreaming brain wants me to focus on. my waking brain remembers how sam's tail would thump against the corner of the house, how my brother and i would climb the lattice supports and get up to the roof. how a weedwacker spat a pebble at the glass door and shattered it, how the glass all came down in a sheet, stuck to the duct tape either mom or dad put up against it. i remember the old computer where we used to make crosswords and those squares of letters where words hid in every direction. i remember playing king of the concrete out to the side, balancing on cement ice flows in the ocean and jumping from iceberg to iceberg. so many things in that same area that are absent in this dream.

because these are not what my dreaming brain remembers. all it has eyes for is the winter death of everything on that porch, and the cold wind that seems to have blown in--and me with it--all the way from dirt town. and i'm not sure what my dreaming brain wants me to get out of this.

there is, i suppose, a reason that i have no desire to return to that home. it can never be the same, and the disappointment of seeing it changed would shatter all my fond memories. but i revisit it in my dreams, walk the corridor with the ship in storm painting at one end and the old stone heart with its four legged black stove at the other, winking it's lacquered eye. i still and always will sprawl in my memory on the pulled out couch-bed, where the family gathers in power outages to hold a slumber party until water and electricity return. the sturdy kitchen table, where we dined, and where sam with a flop of his head could single-chompedly abduct an entire bologna sandwich. swim practice in the summers, packing our lunches and driving off. lunches today can never equal those shivering car meals after practice, with the tupperware beverages and sandwiches, and chips. the banter.

perhaps all my dreaming brain sought to do was to spark this reverie, providing an incentive to prove it wrong about the death and cold. I can provide my own shining sun for these memories, and let my waking brain wander down sloping hills and wade through rain-watered tadpoles. but only sometimes. i love my past, but cannot dwell for long. the present calls, and the future beyond it. it's time to answer.

love and peace.