My mom’s parents have been gone for a while. My grandmother has been gone for 10 years and my grandfather for almost seven. The house that I spent so much time in as a child, and even lived in for a couple of years as a man in my early twenties, was sold two years before either of them left us. Yet in this dream, it played a huge role in, well, something…
The dream began with a bunch of people, mostly family members, doing odd tasks; cooking, watching TV, chasing small kids around and having casual conversations with each other. None of this activity was really out of the ordinary for anytime that my family would get together.
As for myself, I was wandering around outside. I thought about how the garage used to lean to one side. Continuous years of snow piling onto its roof caused the structure to lean and became unstable. It was fixed long before we sold the house, but I always remember it that way.
Anyway, the dream skipped around randomly and then significant things began to take place. Again, I was wandering around the outside of the house looking at how much the grass had grown and how it needed to be cut. So I grabbed the lawnmower out of the garage, as I had so many times in my youth, and began to mow the lawn in the backyard. It was an odd-shaped yard and if you tried to keep the lines running completely straight, it looked funny, so it was better to just go with the natural flow created by the curvature of the driveway and shrubbery along the line that divides us between our neighbors. When I finished, the yard looked so nice and I was very proud of myself. I trimmed the edges of the lawn and it was really the most work I had ever done in the backyard (It’s in the BACK of the house, who is going to see that??).
Once I finished back there, I moved to the front lawn. The front was small and usually took about 10 minutes to mow, but the two large trees usually left broken sticks and twigs all over the place from the squirrels running through the trees. You had to be careful when mowing the front because the blades would shoot the debris out the back into your bare legs, sometimes cutting them up pretty good.
I’m way off my point here, so back I go.
I finished the lawn, but as I turned to head into the house, a large moving truck pulled up, then another. The first truck was to take everything away. The second one contained the belongings of the new family that was moving in – apparently immediately! Moments later, the family arrived in their minivan. A nice, young couple, probably my age, stepped out and opened the back doors to retrieve their children – two girls and a boy - ages six, four and 18 months.
My family came out to greet them and we exchanged pleasantries. However, in a matter of moments, something clicked inside of me and I began to weep. Moments later, I was really crying, the way I have only cried at family funerals. I ran to the other side of the moving trucks so no one else could see me and I sat on the curb and openly sobbed for what seemed like a very long time.
So what does this all mean? To be continued…
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