Waking and dreaming…

It is 8 pm on Saturday night and I am huddled under a pile of blankets listening to the roof groan and shake as fierce winds slam into the walls of my little cement block house. Sometimes when I am all alone in my pink coffee field home I close my eyes and imagine what all my loved ones far away are doing…

I imagine my parents watching a movie and sharing a bottle of red wine on the living room couch…my mother’s eyelids will be become heavy halfway through the movie and she will drag herself upstairs and climb into bed, falling into an immediate heavy sleep…the dogs trailing behind her, the small fluffy white one will curl up next to her, huddled against her for warmth, while the big brown one plops clumsily down beneath a table…my father will finish the movie alone, and will not turn in until well into the night after the house is quiet…

I imagine my brother, maybe out at a friend’s house, or maybe him and a friend hiding out in his room, or playing video games, or whatever it is teenage boys do when they get together…

I imagine my grandparents…my grandmother sitting at her scrap-booking table, her hands moving slowly and steadily as she carefully and methodically cuts photos and shapes and arranges them artfully on page after page…my grandfather sits in the opposite room in his old chair, his feet propped up, his slippers waiting patiently on the floor next to him as he watches television, or maybe an action movie, or a western…

I imagine my best friend coming home from work, slipping off her shoes, throwing her coat in a heap on the floor, along with her clothes as she pulls on warm pajamas and curls up in her purple sheets to read a book she can’t seem to put down…she will read long into the night, well past her bed time, just so she can know what happens on the last page….

I imagine my grandmother…she sits at her dining room table in her familiar house…maybe she is wrapping last minute gifts….maybe one of her grandchildren is visiting for the night and she scoops them a bowl of vanilla ice cream and lets them add the chocolate syrup…I always added more than everyone else and my ice cream tasted like chocolate instead of vanilla….

I imagine all the people celebrating my cousin’s graduation today…maybe a party at their quiet home…I see friends and family filing in and out, laughing and exchanging stories…I picture the brand-new diploma, white paper inside a folding holder, sitting open on the table for all the guests to see as they pass…

I imagine friends bar-hopping…from one to the next…they huddle together in groups, trying to stay warm on a cold Nebraska night as they shuffle down the sidewalk, shrugging out of coats as they enter warm buildings…

I picture myself, driving in my old Pontiac, down side streets and through town…Christmas lights are up and the homes in the neighborhoods off the highway shine in the distance…my fingers skim the front of the radio, the screen has ceased to light up, and the markings have long been rubbed off the buttons, but each is familiar and I do not even glance from the road as I flip through stations finally settling on a country song I know by heart…

I close my eyes and I see all the places where I am not. I imagine the lives that are happening half a world away from me….I see my life as it would be if I were there.

But when I open my eyes I see my life as it truly is…and it is happening right here, right now. I feel the wind blowing in from the crack in the roof, making me pull my blanket tighter under my chin…I watch as my clothes hanging up to dry swing back and forth on the clothesline, their shadows swaying against the wall…I watch as a tiny black bug flutters around the single illuminated light-bulb hanging bare above my bed…I hear the fire-crackers the neighbors are lighting off as part of their Christmas tradition…I hear raised voices, singing, drifting up from the church near the street….

All this pulls me back to the place I am. That other place is only a memory…a dream that plays on the backs of my eyelids when I close them and let myself drift away…some nights when I pull myself back to the here and now, it feels as if I am ripping myself away from the vision of what should be…but some nights, like tonight, I open my eyes and if feels as if I just woke up from a pleasant dream, but a dream nonetheless…I wake up into my reality, and as I listen to the nightly chorus of crickets in my garden, a smile spreads across my face…

Though there is always a place inside me, and empty space, reminding me that at every moment life is happening elsewhere, there is also a place inside me that knows that to see that life happening all I must do is close my eyes and let my imagination take me there…tonight I will dream of fluffy snowflakes that catch in your eyelashes, the gentle breathing of my dog as she sleeps legs stretched out across the carpet in front of the fireplace, and the smell of pine coming from the Christmas tree as it casts a halo of light into the snowy front yard through the front windows…and in the morning I will wake up and shuffle bare-footed onto the porch and watch as wispy white clouds descend over the mountains in the distance, and I will stretch and let the morning sun touch my face…

I don’t have to choose. I can have both. One while waking, and one while dreaming…