I rolled over to my right side, and a dream came to life birthed entirely of the right side of my brain, where poetry occasionally springs from, my fingers are loosed to play untamed melodies on the piano keys, and the smells of my babies are kept in a treasure chest of memory forever.
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| Painting by WhitSpeaks available on Etsy |
The sunset was turquoise and gold over the slow waves of an unknown sea. I sat high up the bluffs next to a gypsy house listening to my third daughter sing fairy music while she cooked me a cheese and egg pie in an outdoor oven built of the gray boulders of the shore. A brown young man dragged his feet up the dusty road, carrying a basket of crusty bread. He stopped for a while on our stoop, and sold me something everyday and another loaf scented with rosemary which I dipped in olive oil and laughed as it dripped down my chin. My hair was long again, and gray, and I had it tied up in a scarf that blew across my back. My skirts jingled with bells and beads and my feet were brown from the sun. Here it was good to be a round woman of my age, because otherwise the villagers might whisper all kinds of ailments plaguing you. My husband climbed the gray rocks with a smiling dog, gargantuan and red, whom he called Newfie. He sat down beside me and I ran my hand down the familiar sudden curve of his strong back, with sand and salt still dripping from his brown curls, and we ate the cheese pie hot with rosemary scented bread and Amy's belly laugh to keep us company. Behind us were caves for exploring by day and haunting by night. My son was on the shore in a lone patch of sunlight streaming down from the gathering clouds, his cropped hair and all his teenage sinews lit golden. The young breadseller visited with us in a language I was only beginning to know, and I tried to tell him this great Truth I saw in the sunbeam and the son on the beach, that somehow it was moments like this that made me so very happy, because I knew I was never alone.
The eldest girls came traipsing up the road with empty bags slung over their shoulders and their laughter on the wind. The eldest was industrious and sewed skirts of many hues from the gauzy floating fabric one can only buy in markets in countries like this, and her younger sister, the artist at large, threaded beads and shells and bits of sea glass across them like moving paintings, and they always sold out when they went to the market on a sunny day with a bag full of their skirts.
In my gypsy kitchen there was a small table, as red as the reddest sunset, a slab cut from the burl of a thousand year old tree and polished until it shone like glass. At night these almost-grown children slept in hammocks on the porches and in the open spaces, lulled to sleep to the tunes of the village below and the surf on the rocks, the old brass bells foraged from ruins and clinking glass of lobster trap floats we'd strung up everywhere. They'd learned their math in the village markets and eaten only what grew in the spaces around this house and hill. We did almost nothing on paper anymore, except to read great books and stories you could get lost for days wandering in.
I stood in the dark, listening to the sounds of the little gypsy house, and thinking about all these things, how different they were from any dream I might have dreamed for them long ago in a straight-backed yellow farmhouse in a very American rural field.
And somehow, when I woke up, I knew that I had dreamed of heaven.
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