Perchance to Dream

Vivid dreams this week.  A counselor once told me that women seemed to dream about houses when their lives are changing. It's true for me. I woke up this morning dreaming about the first house my first husband and I bought and made home.   In the dream he and I visited it, walking up the street to it.  The street was amazingly real and accurate.  The house looked the same except the two cherry trees we had planted were tall and bearing fruit.  We walked in the door and the present owner greeted us saying "I hear you want to buy this back, it's yours if you want." But once inside it was nothing like it was then.  Tardis-like, it was much larger on the inside than it was on the outside.  And the insides were much different, remodeled, five bedrooms instead of two, two fireplaces instead of one, the old one small and closed up. Looked like a do it yourself project, sound but not particularly planned out.  We looked at each other and agreed we didn't want it but I kept strolling though it.

"Dreams in Literature" artist unknown

I spent quite awhile thinking about this today and used a technique from a dream class I took many years ago. It calls on you to interpret your dreams by personifying objects in your dream as yourself.  I started with the old closed up fireplace. Sounds silly but it works.  "I am a small, no longer used fireplace." "A fireplace with a Heatolater vent that heats up the whole house and family but no more." I just kept on, what it/I was, what I looked like, did or didn't do. Including the chimney fire that happened when no one was in the house thankfully. Then it came to me, I always had pictured myself the warm center of the family when we started out.  Many changes, many alterations, some planned, some not. The small house/family changed, split. Divorce happened. Over 40 years ago. That burned our family construct and then the fire went out.  But like that dream house my own interior continued to grow and change. Many hidden rooms, large inside just one person. A person who is no longer the central heat of a family but part of a cluster of smaller, older fires that surround the newer families and their children who are just beginning to strike out into the world. And surprised to find that I am glad of it. It happened quite awhile ago but I feel like I've just begun to recognize the changes and lean into them. The end of Maslow's life list, self-actualization and self-transcendence.

Just a note: I think the cherry trees are our two sons. Tall and well into the journey of their lives. That popped into my mind as I was doing my requisite half hour on the recumbent bike in the gym.  I like to think while I am pedaling away.  They are what their father and I did together that was, as Martha Stewart likes to say "a good thing."

Many blessings to you all.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving: Mother and Son Peeling Potatoes - Norman Rockwell November 24, 1945

Now what old girl

I've been hacking and coughing for weeks but last week some secondary respiratory infection showed up and really did me in. I have COPD and my lungs very cranky anyway.  I didn't think I was going to make it to Urgent Care but I did and I stayed out of the hospital. The kids are picking up my meds and getting my groceries. I can't stop coughing long enough to drive. I've been dining on Safeway deli soup, apples, and coffee. Now I'm out.  Not coffee though, never coffee.  This has been a really crappy 10 days and I am really crabby. No, I'm not happy about the election.  When I saw Leon Russell had died I just sat down and cried.  I'm not normally a weeper even when I should be. Too much.

All of my sisters live in or around Portland, Oregon and have just witnessed the fifth night of rioting downtown.  The first night one headed downtown for a play and certainly did not make it there.  They just barely got turned around and headed for home again.  At  one point several main roads were closed including I-5 and I-84. You can live without seeing a play but God help you if you needed to get to a hospital.

Aunt Helen, our sole surviving elder in our Walla Walla family died at 92 on Tuesday. Now the oldest person in this local branch is me.  In the rest of my family in Western Washington there is just my Dad's youngest sister and her husband both in their 90's.  I feel like I'd like to drive right over there and visit them but I can't drive to the grocery store right now and I am a plague carrier to boot. Guess I will just call for now.  The next oldest in that bunch is, well, me again.  Hopefully in a few more days I should feel like my "old" self.  Blessings to you my friends.