If you look at the time that I am making this post you will notice that it is the wee small hours of the morning. I woke up crying.... and then my stomach began to hurt.... I didn't think that dreams could hurt....
Normally I don't dream hardly at all.... or if I do then when I wake, I forget them right away. Not this week. This week I have been dreaming very vividly.
I may have mentioned here before that I grew up in Newfoundland. I grew up in Mount Pearl which is a city attached to the capital city of St. John's. My parents and grandparents (and if rights be known, their parents to the seventh generation) came from a little outport called Elliston, and though I didn't live there I feel like I actually hale from the town where my grandparents lived more than Mount Pearl. (That's my maternal grandparents for those family members who read here.) I have many good memories of my years growing up and I have very vivid memories of my Grandfather's house and the way it made/makes me feel. I don't know if I am getting maudlin in my old age but sometimes I have to wonder. Maybe all these fresh memories are coming back to me because Teapot and I have been going through all the old photos. Whatever the reason, I have been thinking a lot about those years when I grew up. And then tonight I woke up crying. Not because I was sad, but just because it felt so good to be back in that place again. (For that is surely where I was!)
My grandmother had a chrome and vinyl rocking chair just off the kitchen in the dining room, it was as ugly as sin, but that was the best rocking chair ever. It was smooth. The rockers were really long on that chair and it rocked like a dream. When I rocked in that chair it felt like I was swinging. I would sit for hours in that rocking chair and rock and rock and rock and never since has there been a rocking chair that made me happy like that one did. I even saw in my dream my Grandfather's favorite pipe that he would give me to clean and fill with fresh tobacco. I could feel it in my hand. I could even see the sun slanting across the dining room table through the two big windows that never opened.... at least not in my day. I walked the stairs with the big brass chummy thingies that held the stair runner in place. I stood on the front steps of that house and looked back over my shoulder at the door swinging shut behind me and I remembered..... like I've never remembered since they died.
And I missed them.....
Gives new meaning to Remembrance Day......
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