LAST NIGHT I HAD THE STRANGEST DREAM
It arrived like a messenger with mismatched shoes, humming an old pop song, and carrying a message I didn’t know I needed yet.
I was walking through the first house I ever lived in as a newly married woman, only this time I wasn’t alone. There was a man with me—someone who felt like a recent date, or maybe just a familiar presence borrowed from waking life. I said, “Let me show you around,” as if I were giving a tour of a place I hadn’t stepped into in fifty years.
The first floor was empty, stripped down to its bones. No furniture, no echoes of the life that once filled it. Just the exact flooring, the exact wall colors, the exact kitchen I remember from the early 1970s, as if the house had been staged for a showing and my memory was the realtor showing it.
Nothing unusual happened until I said, “Now, let me show you the upstairs.”
Every room was suddenly vivid. My daughter’s room glowed with that bright yellow carpet she once danced on. The boys’ room was covered in that unmistakable burnt orange. My bedroom held its old beige carpet, quiet and familiar. All of it empty, all of it precise.
And then I opened the boys’ closet.
On the shelves sat pieces of my life I haven’t seen in decades—wine glasses I lost until only three remained, Christmas candle holders I haven’t laid eyes on since the Nixon era, and an entire shelf of coffee mugs I don’t even remember owning. Some items I still have. Many are long gone. All of them were sitting there as if the house had been quietly collecting the things life took from me over time.
Over fifty years old, every last piece.
And here’s the kicker: the house is still standing. Built in 1890— and looking damn good for its age. My subconscious didn’t just rebuild a memory—it sent me back to a place that’s outlived marriages, moves, decades, and at least three sets of carpeting.
