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The light in the dreams is not really dim so much as it is softened, as if sheer curtains have been pulled across the window on the world, as if someone might be asleep somewhere out of view. My Mom would keep the sheers drawn in the morning so the sunrise wouldn’t "fade that painting." But then she wouldn’t open the sheers later in the day either, because the apartment was actually on the top floor of the back building of a motel complex, and the travellers across the way might see in. Dad kept his sheers closed as well, the ones in his room. After his eyes failed him, the light from outside could be very irritating, even with the eyepatch.
Sometimes I dream about the old house, before my parents sold it and moved out. My memories of being there are very dreamlike—memories of Christmases, gardens, the sound of crickets, the smell of the warm garage, the open view across the city before the neighborhood grew up. There were summers when Dad would sit in the darkening shadow under the porch roof, the lit tip of his cigarette blazing bright and lighting his face as he drew, and I could smell the lawn and the snapdragons. The Troopers practiced down on the Dean Morgan football field and the fanfares drifted in and out with the shee-ick of nighthawks and the calls of chorus frogs up at the ponds. Late at night I would drift ghost-like across the yard entranced by the stars in the velvety summer sky. I wish the dreams themselves could be as peaceful.
The dreams are trying to tell me something I have yet to understand. There is the light, subdued and sad, and sometimes there is anticipation. There is luggage. Dad will be back soon, and then we will all go. Or Mom and I are going somewhere and Dad is working so he won’t be joining us—that’s like real life—or I am living out of a duffle bag in someone’s basement where the light is dim, or even in a crowded school where I must change in the women's locker room. Sometimes I am living in my parents’ apartment and they are dead. The door to the hall is open. There are stairs and ramps, and sometimes a hospital a few floors down. One night a few weeks ago I missed the flight to France. My folks were in my dream-mind’s eye, in an old-fashioned propeller plane boarded via rolling steps, and they were going to have to wait for me because I missed the flight. I could preceive my Dad in a dark blue suit, his arms crossed in tension, his face both bored and slightly angry.
There are slopes of varying angles, or stairs, in most of my dreams. Concrete ramps run down into dark and extensive cellars, a grassy bank falls off into the river, a steep climb up roughly-eroded sandstone tops out on a nightmare of honeycombed rock, a long drop down from the mountains disappears around a curve, high ocean swells are frozen and silent and yet are still liquid water...in the house in which my Dad grew up, I gaze from an upstairs window to steep steps leading up to two front doors. My Mom and I in the company of another woman are looking for sheep in an enormous landscape where sparsely-vegetated clay hills tumble down to hip-high grass. The grass is flooded with flowing water which inexplicably slopes down-valley yet does not find its own level. A gentle grade leads to the doors of a grocery store long-gone. I am driving hurriedly down a street, or up another quickly-rising way. On a bicycle I am pedalling uphill into my own neighborhood past houses in which, in other dreams, I have searched in a panic for my dog.
Since she died I have searched for Lily in the night, sometimes finding her, sometimes not. I glimpse her up a terraced backyard in the alley, yet when I get to where she was she has gone further away. She walks through a wicket-wire gate in half-alive lilacs, the old lawn gone to blown-in dirt. She walks out of the open apartment door and I follow, up, down, into other dim apartments where some of my luggage might be and sheers are drawn across other windows.
And always I am not at home; I am setting out on a long drive home or packing to move on, waiting for my parents to join me or to join them somewhere not quite home, taking shower after shower in one and then another bathroom, always getting ready and yet never ready. My Mom wanders a few rooms away in her nightgown, and the apartment looks unlived-in, the light wan and dimming as if there is oil in my eyes. There are few of my parents things as my blurring vision sweeps the rooms, and eventually there is no one there at all.
Potato Soup
I made it the way I think you did—
boil the potatoes, mash them in their water
make a roux from the bacon grease—
(be sure and use enough)
--add the milk and boil it thick
mix it in to the thinnish mash until
it tastes like home.
And it does, Mom,
it does taste like when we were a family
just three of us with some things
to bitch about but mostly laughing
and saying "mmm".
April 2, 2005