almost the apple harvest

okay. day 8 of the flu. pretty out of it but want to jot down something of last night's dream. i remember going to sleep wondering what my dreaming mind would come up with.. and maybe thinking how I wish I hadn't seen the tattered, empty, weedy lot where the old house once stood. It battles in my head for more pure recollections of that spectacularly privileged place (though honestly I think of many other things; this is my writing topic for now as I'm pulling together some poems at least on this). But I did want to see it. To live fully in reality on this one. I do kindof regret that though. The brambly weeds push up through every memory. She would die all over again if she could see it. (though once at a time when things had begun to fall apart in which there had been a long time without gardners, she came out to the house alone and got a heart-shocking glimpse of the (what are actually) grounds (such was her life) in complete neglect,- at least the knee-high weeds where the sloping green lawn was, and, for a time, returned). I'm glad she will never know what happened to this place she loved more than any on earth.

I have one thing left from my visit to Reality: a plastic bowl from the playhouse - only that structure not destroyed (Andrea's charming design for a playing paradise) - the ceiling still with our names written there: "Andrea aka Mommy" and "Patrick was right here, right now". In the plastic bowl - what once (in these intevening years) was a nest. Every last shred of everything gone. The pool - filled in. Even the Indian well. Covered over. Unidentified. As if there hadn't been a house there for three hundred years. Or ever.

And so sometimes I dream of the house full of partyers on the upper floors - floors that are rich with mirrors and bedrooms and biways. They are always loud and stupid people but I am grateful the rooms still exist, and the velvet clothes and bevelled glass (though it was not really like that... it was just a homey and haunted old farmhouse).

Now we're driving out by Sunset Street. (I'm in the back back seat - like I often was). Patrick is there and a guy from work. oh never mind all that... with every sneeze - the details vanish.

I just wanted to jot down two things: one, how part of the land was now an orchard, and an actively tended one. Though, as is true, the land looks 100% different than it did, it was good to see that people were there, pruning the branches and preparing for the harvest. (the metaphor not lost on me as all this cutting away is leading to new growth, somehow). Still, I could see on the the left, the wild, ragged field and experienced there a dream within a dream, a recurring one, of simply meeting Andrea one day outside, with much of the family around, aware, as we stepped, that those few steps were being taken at, were marking even, the absolute peak of our youth and love and luck. (I think I even remember in that dream within a dream - the reference to another; I can see it now, but won't bother writing about it).

In the house 'now', much has been rebuilt, made new. I try to pace off (as I did in the empty field) where things should be/had been. There was one dresser: mom's from her childhood, I guess. There was also a way upstairs, past new sheetrocked walls that soon gave way to the old things: a floor on which much of the old house was still old.
A picture of us was on the ceiling. The ceiling was low, low and sloped downward. The room had been converted to a cinema, big and full of chairs. I was glad something was preserved, though for some reason they had removed the top two floors, where everything valuable had been. (though there never had been four floors - maybe that's blurring with the townhouses were there were four floors and I always found that kind of hard to work with psychologically - espec. W72nd)- hmm. interesting.. the everything valuable: Andrea on the 3rd floor, the girls on the 4th.

Not a thrilling dream, but the orchard was fresh and natural and comforting - and the little picture of us on the ceiling even though no one knew who we were: maybe this because I just walled in an old painting exhibition announcement behind my new sheetrock in my kitchen: a lunchtime conversation piece for some future lug with a sledgehammer.

anyway. here's a pic to do battle with the weeds in my head.