Enter the Nightmare
So the hubby woke up to a little gasp from me, and as I continued to make periodic and sudden sounds of grief and distress, he decided to wake me up too. Had a brief moment of "it was only a dream!" but still, as I began to tell him about it, I started crying for real, as I had been doing in my sleep.
This probably has to do with the current situation with the Cow Palace and a recent trip home to visit my mother, but wherever this came from, the relief I feel at it only being a dream is not entirely complete, because unlike giant, brightly-colored snakes that heavily drop from the ceiling and sing whale songs, this is actually possible.
I grew up on an 80 acre sheep farm. The landlady and her husband run the farm, and collect rent from a handful of houses on it, and have a daughter my age who will inherit all of it. Their daughter is awesome, let me just say. A 4-H Aggie girl as long as I have known her (age 8) and now just recently married and graduated from Davis, where she trained as a veterinarian. Her actions in this dream speak to a naiveté or desperation that I have never known her to possess. I was standing in the kitchen and my father was telling me that the landlords had died, and that their daughter had agreed to allow developers to embark upon an 80-year development project (that time-line should have been my dream tip) that would begin with a grocery store, and eventually turn into a shopping center, which would eventually turn into one of those truly massive places like Wal*Mart or Home Depot with a parking lot twice as huge. Of course, this would lead to condo developments on the rest of the property, more traffic, sidewalks and this would all be good for the community. Ha.
I know I was already stunned by the prospect of the razing of my childhood home, but this aside, I ran to the door and out onto our tiny porch and there was my vision. Only one house remained: our landlord's large farmhouse, crowded within inches by 80 acres of ugly, and worse than ugly: just like so many other places. These greedy people had cloned themselves onto our surface, which, though fenced off into large fields, had been wild and beautiful and interesting. I know I have seen that place in waking life. So have we all. That one old house on the corner of the shopping center that doesn't seem to belong. It's the shopping center that doesn't belong.