For several days I have found it impossible to capture the light.
Before sunrise, as the beagles happily disrupt the neighborhood with their hopeful howling (whatever is upwind for them every morning never gets any older for them than does the thrill of having the same old thing for every meal), I see vivid, wavering lines of yellow which I cannot seem to replicate in a photograph.
At sunset I see streaks of bright pink at peach and try, but fail, to capture them with the camera Jim gave me. I know he could have done better.
And in between, during daylight, the sky has shifted wildly, cleaved between storm and sunshine, winter and spring.
Over the same period my dreams have shifted. They are always about Jim, but for the first time I have had dreams in which Jim is not sick, has not yet been diagnosed.
For well over a year, since his diagnosis, I never had a dream in which my subconscious was not acutely aware that Jim was sick.
The scenes in these recent dreams are of things I can never fully recapture.
These dreams are so stunningly ordinary as to be extraordinary, and they bring me some peace: we are sitting with the children laughing and watching a movie, going to a band event, walking in the woods, even swatting at the zombie-like mosquitoes which sometimes mysteriously appear inside our house even in deep winter in New Hampshire (and tended to escape above the reach of a five-two person but within the leaping reach of my six-fourish spouse). Before dawn one day I trudged around the yard cleaning up after our dogs, among the endless tasks which have fallen to me alone. But in my dreams that night, Jim and I were cleaning up together.
These dreams bring back, if briefly, the family life in which I know Jim would want our memories to dwell.
(c)2012 Stephanie M. Glennon
Love in the Spaces 