Gentle reader,
There’s a geography to my dreams.
I suppose dreams might need to grow geographies because people are the sort of creatures for whom places matter, and even in dreams, we can’t do our work without it being from somewhere.
images in this piece were designed on canva
Asleep, we own a home, my husband and I.
The home in my dreams is enormous and beautiful and improbably luxurious, but it’s plagued by several anomalies. Please keep reading past the good part; the troubles are that of which I really wish to speak.
I don’t have dream recall of buying the place. I think I have a mortgage, but I don’t remember signing. I have a vague sense the move was ill-advised, but I don’t feel, precisely, that I’m responsible for it, not knowing quite how we got here.
The house is three floors tall and possibly endless in width; should it not prove endless, it’s very, very long. The main floor is for entertaining. There, I’ve held fancy dress galas, awkward gatherings of extended family, and barbeques with friends.
Though I’m a hobbit, an introvert, a gal happy to stay home alone for days at a time, there are many gatherings in the house of my dreams. I suppose place is for meetings. For joinings. For mixings. For openings.
Turning left off the central foyer, one finds rooms full of books from floor to soaring ceilings. At least two sun porches are perfect for reading, and, depending on the evening, I might also find a jacuzzi or a pool or a fountain or several of each and all. Doors open out to well-appointed patios climbing with roses. Space. Beauty. Dusty corners unexamined, because you can see what drew me in.
These things are gut desire. Sun warmed porches. The smell of petrichor and paper.
For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world (1 John 2:16 NIV).
And then, there are the oddities.
The previous owners, a couple grown so powdery with time they’d blown right away, have left so much stuff behind. Some of this is good. Most of the books were theirs, and, having lucked into a house which should be so far beyond our means, we can’t afford much in the way of furnishings, so we’re glad enough to use their things for now.
Am I really glad? Not really. I want more. And more will have to mean so much more of more, since I have all this space and height and length. I don’t admit my failure at enjoying our good fortune.
And some of the masses of things are sinister. There are locked cabinets and items so personal I don’t want to handle them long enough to get them to the dumpster. The things are legion. I’ll never gather the energy to plow through it all and take things to the thrift shop.
Those things weigh on me. I feel them, always, on my shoulders. Their presence raising prickles on the back of my neck.
I do ponder resale value, though. The closet of eerily animate puppets contains every possible kind—an elephant, a clown, a rabbit, an eel—and they might be very valuable if it could prove safe to touch them, if I could find the right buyer.
Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal (Matthew 6:19 NLT).
A bit more problematic: the sole way to let the dogs out is to take them through the basement, past the puppet closet and the towering stacks of abandoned unknowns, down several long hallways. This is inconvenient, but what’s really disturbing is that only when I get there do I remember that the back door is insecure, that anyone could get in here if they knew, that we still haven’t fixed it.
I won’t remember it when I’m back upstairs. Will not acknowledge how vulnerable this place is.
For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away (1 Peter 1:24 KJV).
I haven’t yet spoken of the big thing.
The thing that let us buy this endless mansion when so obviously it should be out of our reach.
The house is haunted.
We use the first and third floors, but the second is off limits. I’m always forgetting to warn guests they mustn’t, whatever they do, open the heavy walnut doors on the second-floor landings. They should pass by, quickly, moving from first floor to third, looking down or up, never at those doors.
There was, you see, a fire there. Servants and children were asleep on that second floor when the flames came through. The house’s original owners, to save themselves, chose to let the sleepers burn.
And there are the ghosts. I regret to tell you that they’re malevolent. I regret to tell you that neither sleep nor hospitality is likely to be safe in this home.
The ghosts are handsome and shimmery and hide lupine teeth and leonine claws.
What do I think of my house, when I’m sleeping? What thoughts best help me pretend that the horror of the bodies and the ghosts isn’t piercing ice in the pit of my stomach? Just this: that when we can pull together enough cash, we’ll do a full reno on the second floor.
It will be expensive, especially since it costs so much these days to get someone to clean up and properly dispose of bodies. The price tag will be merited, though, as I don’t want to know just what that involves. Definitely expensive, but, cash in hand, we’ll be able to clean it out. We’ll strip it past the studs. Put up walls that have never tasted smoke. Tear out the doors on the landing.
What I don’t think about: how we got to this place; willing to take on corpses and ghosts for all that square footage and those sun rooms.
What I don’t think about: the need for an exorcism. The need for a reconciliation. Between the ghosts and my family, the latest of the living sleepers to move in.
What I don’t think about: the seared flesh on the second floor. As though the fact of death’s immobility could keep the ghosts at bay.
And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the Lord your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger… (Joel 2:13 KJV).
My dream house is a nightmare. I don’t expect to move anytime soon.
Grace and peace,
BFJ
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