Scenic Drive, The 400,000 th Reprise
I dreamed about my old house again. For the 400,000th time since hearing my bedroom door click shut loudly in the summer of 1985, cramming myself into my mom's packed VW Rabbit with most of my stuff left behind, and headed for California where my brother was already settled, going as fast as my mom could legally drive so that she could file for divorce from my dad before he could file for divorce from her. Following this painful exit from the only home of my childhood that I ever loved began the even more painful episode of the custody battle for my sister between my parents.
That episode hurt all of us in different ways and left deep shady un-discussed impressions under the surface of my skin where the scars still live quietly.
I wonder if my mother's touch pops up in the current garden of our old house in the form of volunteers of foxgloves and carnations and I wonder if the bank of irises she delighted in so much are still there too? I wonder if her bleeding heart has managed to evade garden redesigns by all the people who have called this home after us.
(Shhhhh. I think the house loved me better than anyone who has lived there since; the way I used to hug the oak floors in front of the wood stove and the way I used to hang out of my bedroom window to talk to the bay tree during wild storms. I believe that the dreams are the house calling to me. Telling me it's time to come home.)
I nearly always dream of Mrs. Stemple who lived next door to us when I dream of my old house. Even though she turned my parents in for growing pot on their window sill. That's because I spent as much time as possible with her in her sweet peaceful kitchen full of black tea with cream and sugar and her cookies because her place was sanctuary. She never treated me like a grubby hippie kid with druggie parents. She collected all the stray children in the neighborhood. She was never too busy or too tired to let you hang out with her. She had funny little toys for us all to play with while she watched game shows and Mr. Stemple smoked his pipe silently.
I can't even remember what she looked like now or what kind of clothes she wore. She was thin and short and already in her late seventies when I left Ashland. Her physical form is all blurred impressions while her kindness and her welcome and her house are vivid to this day; merely an extension of my own home just feet away across the wide driveway.
I believe in letting the past go, in moving on and starting fresh. I believe in having no regrets and not dwelling on things that didn't work out.
You'd never know that if you only know me from my blog which I only started writing four years ago when I began the most challenging period of my life. Especially the last couple of years.
Why, then, can't my subconscious let go of this old house on Scenic Drive? I don't sit around pining for it while I'm awake unless I just dreamed about it. I don't spend every day wishing I had never moved. I was 15 when I left for god's sake! I've moved a dizzying number of times in my life and I even fell completely for my house in Santa Rosa which I do, in fact, still shamefully pine for in my darker moods. But I don't dream about my pink house in Santa Rosa. It doesn't haunt me and call to me while I sleep.
When I wake up from these dreams I feel lost like a person who went to sleep twenty five years ago and just woke up to a completely different wrong life. What happened to me? How did I get here? I feel sad and full of the same vivid chest pains I felt when my mom packed me up and hauled me off. I want to set it adrift. Tell the house to stop calling me or figure out how to make my subconsciousness stop reaching backwards without my wish.
When I wake up from these dreams I would do almost anything to move back into that house.
I want to take the book I'm reading, a long cold beer, and a bowl of strawberries from the yard and sit in the wicker chair around the side on the front porch, shaded by the fig tree like I used to do on hot days when I was a kid. Minus the beer. You can almost see my ghost on the porch in the picture.
I want to go home.
That episode hurt all of us in different ways and left deep shady un-discussed impressions under the surface of my skin where the scars still live quietly.
I wonder if my mother's touch pops up in the current garden of our old house in the form of volunteers of foxgloves and carnations and I wonder if the bank of irises she delighted in so much are still there too? I wonder if her bleeding heart has managed to evade garden redesigns by all the people who have called this home after us.
(Shhhhh. I think the house loved me better than anyone who has lived there since; the way I used to hug the oak floors in front of the wood stove and the way I used to hang out of my bedroom window to talk to the bay tree during wild storms. I believe that the dreams are the house calling to me. Telling me it's time to come home.)
I nearly always dream of Mrs. Stemple who lived next door to us when I dream of my old house. Even though she turned my parents in for growing pot on their window sill. That's because I spent as much time as possible with her in her sweet peaceful kitchen full of black tea with cream and sugar and her cookies because her place was sanctuary. She never treated me like a grubby hippie kid with druggie parents. She collected all the stray children in the neighborhood. She was never too busy or too tired to let you hang out with her. She had funny little toys for us all to play with while she watched game shows and Mr. Stemple smoked his pipe silently.
I can't even remember what she looked like now or what kind of clothes she wore. She was thin and short and already in her late seventies when I left Ashland. Her physical form is all blurred impressions while her kindness and her welcome and her house are vivid to this day; merely an extension of my own home just feet away across the wide driveway.
I believe in letting the past go, in moving on and starting fresh. I believe in having no regrets and not dwelling on things that didn't work out.
You'd never know that if you only know me from my blog which I only started writing four years ago when I began the most challenging period of my life. Especially the last couple of years.
Why, then, can't my subconscious let go of this old house on Scenic Drive? I don't sit around pining for it while I'm awake unless I just dreamed about it. I don't spend every day wishing I had never moved. I was 15 when I left for god's sake! I've moved a dizzying number of times in my life and I even fell completely for my house in Santa Rosa which I do, in fact, still shamefully pine for in my darker moods. But I don't dream about my pink house in Santa Rosa. It doesn't haunt me and call to me while I sleep.
When I wake up from these dreams I feel lost like a person who went to sleep twenty five years ago and just woke up to a completely different wrong life. What happened to me? How did I get here? I feel sad and full of the same vivid chest pains I felt when my mom packed me up and hauled me off. I want to set it adrift. Tell the house to stop calling me or figure out how to make my subconsciousness stop reaching backwards without my wish.
When I wake up from these dreams I would do almost anything to move back into that house.
I want to take the book I'm reading, a long cold beer, and a bowl of strawberries from the yard and sit in the wicker chair around the side on the front porch, shaded by the fig tree like I used to do on hot days when I was a kid. Minus the beer. You can almost see my ghost on the porch in the picture.
I want to go home.
Comments (4)
It's funny.... for years I have dreamed about my grandparents' house in Maine. The house I grew up in? No, not that I have bad memories..but my grandparents' house-----oh that I dreamed about so many times. SO many times.....
Posted by The Sandwich Life | May 14, 2010 3:43 PM
Posted on May 14, 2010 15:43
Whenever there is a specific 'home' in my dreams, which is often, and you know I dream fairly lucidly most of the time, it is ALWAYS the ranch house out in west Petaluma that my dad lived at until about ten years ago. We moved there when I was 3 and I only lived there full time about a year before my parents separated. after that it was weekend custody. Yet it has become what my subconscious pulls up when it looks up the feeling, being, or thinking of home. Sometimes the dreams are nightmares, sometimes I'm a child, sometimes its the home for my own children. Ive dropped it in Asia, and in College.
So Im not sure if its the same for you- if your childhood home has become a symbol of home to your subconscious like mine or if it is that you really loved it and so it represents stability? Or a serenity?
I loved that ranch house, though the family scenes were often NOT peaceful. I loved the goats in the grape vines and the ladybugs in the fields, the branches that led to hidden forbidden roof spots. Isn't it strange that a house/land can rise about it's inhabitants?
Perhaps this is why we are such the homemakers- searching for or trying to create a feeling of peace and place and joy in our homes.
Posted by Sharon | May 15, 2010 8:01 PM
Posted on May 15, 2010 20:01
That's interesting that you dream about the Petaluma ranch. Yes, I think the Ashland house has become a symbol of home for my subconscious mind. I really loved the Santa Rosa stucco house so much I was surprised when I still found myself dreaming of the Ashland house. I have still never lived in a single house longer than I lived in the Ashland house so I'm sure it stands for stability.
I also don't doubt that this attachment to our childhood homes has contributed to and inspired a lot of our love of homemaking.
Posted by angelina | May 18, 2010 7:37 AM
Posted on May 18, 2010 07:37
It seems many of us can relate to missing our childhood home. My parents divorce when I was five, and all my life I dreamed of being on the stairs that go to the front door of my father's home in San Francisco. Later, in my fifties, I returned to that house to live with my father for a year when he was very old and ill. The house was left to me, but shortly before his death in his mid nineties, a cousin appeared and my father made him the trustee of his estate. Now, that house really is a memory. My cousin sold it shortly after my father's death, but I long to be in my childhood home every day, even now.
Posted by Sheila | May 19, 2010 8:41 AM
Posted on May 19, 2010 08:41