Mysterious Productions II

So it turns out that not only is the house I grew up on the market, but of course there is a virtual tour of it on the internet. I looked at it, disoriented, trying to figure out which room they were in - this one darker than I recall, this one brighter; where would the porch be if this is the room I think it is?

The most disorienting of course was sheer decoration - as a friend stated on Facebook "Whoa. Back away from the stencils." Amazing how much of a house is what's done with the space - of course, I see the "positive" side of this all the time (Before and After pix of spaces are a favorite of mine) but I'm not used to seeing it "backwards" so to speak - this is the After and I am trying hard to backpedal into the Before. Only its not working, and that's a good thing.

Last night my mostly humorous confusion (no tears over this one, relief, actually, to see that time has, in fact, moved on in that home) manifested in the form of a dream taking place at my grandmother's house - the one I actually saw years after she died, when a young couple with two small kids accepted my story and let me in to see it. In the dream, my mother is alive and telling me how hard it was to deal with all of my grandmother's effects. There was a chair I had wanted badly and Mom got it wrong - got the wrong chair (now a scratching post in our living room) - and in the dream I couldn't find the chair and cried. Mom started to blame me - as she had done in real life - that I hadn't come to help, how could I expect her to get it right? - and I calmly responded that her anger was legitimate, but also she needed to see that I was 13 and missing two important people, too. We were able to reach some state of peace - true peace, sad and slightly angry, but without base aggression - and hold one another, if only for a moment.

We were interrupted in our hug by a knock at the door. A strange couple with a limo outside were looking to take my grandmother away - to a party, they said, but we knew it was to death - and suddenly her house became a maze. I kept pulling chunks of fuzz out of my mouth (this has been an odd theme lately in some of my dreams - that I cannot speak for endless gum or fabric or fuzz in my mouth, which I pull out but continues to clog my throat - and so couldn't tell them that I hadn't seen her, not in years, and thought she was already dead. We wandered through some ethereal version of her house, now made into a dream world expansion with empty corridors spanning across centuries of timelessness, me pulling out wads of fuzz and sticky substances, trying to hide them, throw them away, so no one would see me choking.

The cats woke me, meowing and batting at one another. I had to shake the fog of the dream off my face, check my mouth and throat for clear passage. The red finches and sparrows have returned, and they chirped at the windows. I gave thanks to my house, told my grandmother and mother both that I miss them, and meditated for 15 minutes, tempering to-do lists with my breath. Back to the present: writing, a hiking date for 1pm today, granola and yoghurt breakfast. Which is more mysterious, I wonder? This reality or that one? What's in my head or what is in front of my eyes? Maybe there's no hierarchy. Maybe they are all mystery productions.