Dream: Big, But Not That Big (Weekend Edition)
Sunday, August 31st:
I'd tagged along with Sowah and one of his ensembles on a field trip somewhere, but they left me behind on the return trip.
I walked back home with beltramgregor. A bridge of copper tiles spanned the moat around my new house. We ran onto the bridge at an angle, stepping into the water onto a second copper bridge hidden just below the surface. (The main bridge was a decoy covered in traps.) We hopscotched along the hidden bridge, leaping between the missing sections. Halfway across, we jumped to the copper panels on the wall to the right of the bridge and ran along the wall, where gravity bent by 90 degrees to keep us from falling in. We jumped back to the ground on the far side and the world righted itself.
Inside, a 300-foot hallway ran the length of the house on the basement level. Another corridor just as long ran directly above it on the second floor. Shallow, curved alcoves like light-wells communicated between the two passageways along one wall. Someone jogged down the lower hallway as I entered, running the loop for exercise.
Genevieve had dropped by to see the house. Why do I always miss it when people arrive? I wondered. She hadn't made it past the foyer, though, so I gave her the tour.
I lead her to one of my favorite rooms on the first floor, just past the den. Tan canvas lay across the floor, draped along the walls and bowed from the ceiling. We felt several inches of coarse sand under the canvas cushioning our footsteps. Light shone through the canvas overhead, giving the room a tent-like ambiance. Lines and dots painted in blue and red across the floor laid out a giant board for a game about Persian warfare. (I hadn't played yet, but it looked pretty good.)
We walked into the front hall on the ground floor. The jogger ran past the balcony section of the upper corridor above us. We turned left and headed for the stairs at the other end of the front hall. To our right, the floor sloped gradually down towards the front of the house, the carpet blending into a grassy hillside.
A pair of columnar windows stretched from the base of the hill to the ceiling. Today, they looked upon a gray plateau between us and a fabulous city of white stone domes and spires on the slope of a mountain, hazy in the near-distance. The vista got a "Wow" from Genevieve, and I was impressed too, but I tried to restrict my reaction to a small nod, as if I'd expected such a view.
We passed ytinas and her antithetical better half eating a picnic lunch atop a blanket on the hillside. A little farther, I saw my dad loaning his audio equipment to my cousins, and Marcia set up a microphone stand by Ron's chair to record him telling a joke.
Upstairs, my mom bustled past us with a vacuum cleaner. When I showed Genevieve one of the bedrooms, she lifted the covers from the bed to look underneath.
"Is this where you and...." she asked warmly.
I knew she was looking for something in particular, something missing. I crawled under the covers headfirst to look for it. I was surprised to hear Genevieve follow me into the bed, but we didn't run into each other because we were both lost. We tumbled out a minute later, disheveled and tangled in the sheets; my mom had just tipped the mattress up to strip the bed.
"Oh," she said, flustered and embarrassed. "I can come back."
"No, that's okay, we were just... looking for something," I finished lamely. "I think it's in the guest room."
I heard a radio interview with a man who used to rent a room from the previous owner. He said the owner had promised to give him a globe full of bronze army men from Iraq for his collection, but then he asked for $200 to cover shipping. I looked through the shelf full of the previous owner's stuff that still cluttered the garage, hoping to find the globe. I found five big bottles of thick pink bubble solution with bubble wands. I wanted to give them away, but I was stuck on top of the garage door and couldn't get down. I tried to make enough bubbles to entertain the cats so I could leave, but some of the bottles had congealed.
[I woke craving a chicken-bacon sandwich with fresh mango, red bell pepper, and spinach under an acorn glaze.]
I'd tagged along with Sowah and one of his ensembles on a field trip somewhere, but they left me behind on the return trip.
I walked back home with beltramgregor. A bridge of copper tiles spanned the moat around my new house. We ran onto the bridge at an angle, stepping into the water onto a second copper bridge hidden just below the surface. (The main bridge was a decoy covered in traps.) We hopscotched along the hidden bridge, leaping between the missing sections. Halfway across, we jumped to the copper panels on the wall to the right of the bridge and ran along the wall, where gravity bent by 90 degrees to keep us from falling in. We jumped back to the ground on the far side and the world righted itself.
Inside, a 300-foot hallway ran the length of the house on the basement level. Another corridor just as long ran directly above it on the second floor. Shallow, curved alcoves like light-wells communicated between the two passageways along one wall. Someone jogged down the lower hallway as I entered, running the loop for exercise.
Genevieve had dropped by to see the house. Why do I always miss it when people arrive? I wondered. She hadn't made it past the foyer, though, so I gave her the tour.
I lead her to one of my favorite rooms on the first floor, just past the den. Tan canvas lay across the floor, draped along the walls and bowed from the ceiling. We felt several inches of coarse sand under the canvas cushioning our footsteps. Light shone through the canvas overhead, giving the room a tent-like ambiance. Lines and dots painted in blue and red across the floor laid out a giant board for a game about Persian warfare. (I hadn't played yet, but it looked pretty good.)
We walked into the front hall on the ground floor. The jogger ran past the balcony section of the upper corridor above us. We turned left and headed for the stairs at the other end of the front hall. To our right, the floor sloped gradually down towards the front of the house, the carpet blending into a grassy hillside.
A pair of columnar windows stretched from the base of the hill to the ceiling. Today, they looked upon a gray plateau between us and a fabulous city of white stone domes and spires on the slope of a mountain, hazy in the near-distance. The vista got a "Wow" from Genevieve, and I was impressed too, but I tried to restrict my reaction to a small nod, as if I'd expected such a view.
We passed ytinas and her antithetical better half eating a picnic lunch atop a blanket on the hillside. A little farther, I saw my dad loaning his audio equipment to my cousins, and Marcia set up a microphone stand by Ron's chair to record him telling a joke.
Upstairs, my mom bustled past us with a vacuum cleaner. When I showed Genevieve one of the bedrooms, she lifted the covers from the bed to look underneath.
"Is this where you and...." she asked warmly.
I knew she was looking for something in particular, something missing. I crawled under the covers headfirst to look for it. I was surprised to hear Genevieve follow me into the bed, but we didn't run into each other because we were both lost. We tumbled out a minute later, disheveled and tangled in the sheets; my mom had just tipped the mattress up to strip the bed.
"Oh," she said, flustered and embarrassed. "I can come back."
"No, that's okay, we were just... looking for something," I finished lamely. "I think it's in the guest room."
I heard a radio interview with a man who used to rent a room from the previous owner. He said the owner had promised to give him a globe full of bronze army men from Iraq for his collection, but then he asked for $200 to cover shipping. I looked through the shelf full of the previous owner's stuff that still cluttered the garage, hoping to find the globe. I found five big bottles of thick pink bubble solution with bubble wands. I wanted to give them away, but I was stuck on top of the garage door and couldn't get down. I tried to make enough bubbles to entertain the cats so I could leave, but some of the bottles had congealed.
[I woke craving a chicken-bacon sandwich with fresh mango, red bell pepper, and spinach under an acorn glaze.]