Days that Slipped By

I lay in my bed with the covers pulled up over my head. I was trying to hold on to the last elusive silver thread of an escaping dream, butI felt it drift further and furter on the milky sea of time and space, threathening to disappear into the horizon like a swirl of colorful paint. I was left on the shore of barren reality with a pounding heart and lingering warmth of my childhood memories expanding inside my head.

It was one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming, and are able to direct what you are doing. In my dream, I was back in my childhood home, the beautiful modern early 70’s red brick and wood house my father designed and built.
My mom’s carefully tended backyard garden was blooming heavily as always in July. Sweet summer sun bathed everything with warm, deep golden light, muting and softening all the colors. Nesting birds sang high up on the fir trees and the fresh laundry pinned on the lines bobbed and twirled joyfully with the summer breeze. Somewhere, very close, the cats were curled up in the shade for an afternoon nap. I walked barefoot around the yard, feeling the softeness of the matted grass mingled with white and red clower.
The streets and houses built in the neighborhood during the 80’s were not there, instead; glorious bushes of wild pussy willow and silver birch stretched their branches towards the blue summer sky, allowing a fine shadow for blue-bells and wild berries to bloom. A faint melody from mom’s old radio escaped through the open kitchen window. It wondrered about in the backyard, mingling with the sounds of the bees and other insects going about their daily chores.
My mother stood by the south end of the house with her hands on her hips, wearing orange capris and a sleeveless shirt . She was in her 40’s, and her dark curls were held back with an orange, siffon scarf. Her long, tear-shaped, golden earrings swinged back and forth in a familiar rythm as she let out a note of her contageous laugh, amused by my bewilderment. The sun made her skin glow and her teeth glisten. She pointed towards the birch and ash hedge she had planted on the west side of the house with her own two hands and a showel when I was seven years old. She urged me to explore the surroundings, for she knew I was visiting from the future.
The hedge was six feet high, half the size when it was finally cut down in the early 90’s, and replaced with a pale yellow wooden fence my father made. My heart was delighted to see the lovely shade the hedge made, spreading its lacy shadow towards to the cemented front door steps, where we used to sit during summer afternoons and drink pear-flavored soda, lick ice-cream cones bought from a kiosk by the old Shell gas station, where we biked or ran with shorts shorts on and flip-flops clicking, and dreamed about owning a horse.
While I was standing there in wonder, a small child ran around the corner with a wisp of a silky, blond hair dancing in the breeze. She was smiling a toothy smile, full of life and happiness. I scooped her up in my arms and hugged her, my baby sister! My heat was swelling with pure joy. I started to go into the house carrying her up the steps, taking in that deliciously clean smell of a child.
It was then that my dream started leaving me. I couldn’t hold onto it, no matter what. It slipped away and left me laying in my bed, heart shrinking and overwhelming sense of loss filling my senses.

My mom’s hair-tie, the one with two, burnt orange, wooden balls hangs by my vanity mirror. She used to pull her hair up and fasten it with that exact tie, back in the seventies, when days slipped by unnoticed.
Seeing it gives me comfort.

(Please see the photo in my Art bubble)

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Tags:

summer, mother, dream, retro, home, 1970s, childhood, sister, past, mom and melancholia