I had an epic dream last night. I dreamed that I was in the house of my
childhood--except that it wasn’t really.
It wasn’t a house that in my waking life I had ever been in before, but
the feeling of the big old rambling house was that it was ‘home’. It was a huge house, full of many, many
rooms, each room full of things, the belongings, the accumulated memorabilia
and ephemera of a lifetime.
The house,
which had been added on to and added on to over the generations, was a house of
the accumulations of centuries of living and rooms of memories of a long and
full life. And we--the relatives with
whom I was wandering through the house--had been alive a long, long time.
We wandered from room to room, looking at
things, toys, games, photos, items and rooms that evoked memories and
places. In some of the rooms were other
relatives, old, still, but not really dead, just…part of the furniture, part of
walls, the room itself in the particular room where they had chosen to finally
take a rest. And that’s what we, the
relatives I stood with, were looking for--the room to finally take our rest.
You see, we’d been alive for a long time, much
longer than normal--like hundreds of years--and it had been a long, full and
wonderful life. And we were thinking
that perhaps, it was time to stop, sit, and rest and we were looking for the
room where we wanted to spend the remainder of our time.
But as we wandered, looking at toys, photos,
out the window, the stacks and piles of collected souvenirs of a lifetime of
living, thinking through the memories that the plethora of belongings in each
of the rooms evoked in us, one of us said, “There’re so many things I’d like to
do just one more time before we rest.” “We
haven’t played this game in awhile.” “I’d
like to walk along the shores of Lake Superior again.” “I need to get back to Street Fair just one
more time.” “I haven’t talked to
so-and-so in ages…I should call her….”
So we kept walking….walking through the rooms, the many rooms of the
age-old mansion….
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