Dreams and Memories

I go through long dry spells of not remembering any dreams I may have, or of having less interesting ones.  Then something happens and it’s one after another, or vivid all-nighters, and I actually recall something about them on waking.

The night before last was a good example.  It’s also an extension of one of those “dream places” that appear over and over.  I can understand that I still have disproportionate dreams taking place in the house where I grew up, or houses that include aspects of that one, or in the immediate yard.  This one was in a building up the street that has no business being in my dreams regularly.  My father will know the one I mean.

My house was on a dirt road, 1/3 mile from the nearest street and other houses.  Mostly it was surrounded by woods, though in one direction, along the rest of the street, was open, sandy field.  While we didn’t have neighboring houses, there were other buildings, owned by the family who owned the hundreds of acres surrounding our one acre.  My grandfather had been the caretaker of the property.

On the same side as the house, immediately next to us and the reason termites were such a problem, was an old sawmill and associated sawdust pile.  Next was a long building, long side to the road, that housed equipment.  Right after that was a road that looped around a sandpit, lined by stacks of raw boards that had once upon a time been made at the sawmill, and some other fun stuff like brick tiles and relatively uniform, painted flint rocks.

Next on that side was an army green, garage-like building, fairly tall, with a pointed roof, with the garage door/short side facing the road.  It was large enough to house something like an extremely large bulldozer.

Next came a series of small sheds, smaller to larger, ordered by size.  They were also army green, wood with sheet metal exteriors.  Each had a single, person-sized door.  The largest was perhaps six by six.  The smallest was perhaps three by a foot and a half.  I might even have a print picture somewhere that happens to include that small one, after it had been moved to our yard and used mainly by me to store stuff.  Also in that lineup of sheds, which had been for storing powder or munitions during the war, was an outhouse.  I hated having to use the outhouse when I was little, because it tended to attract hornets.  Just after the row of sheds, the land dropped off precipitousely, and the road curved down a hill to run through Turkey Swamp and some cranberry bogs there.  There was another such outhouse, placed incongruously in the woods between two sections of bogs, for people to use when working them.

Okay, back to my house, which was on the left as you come in from the main road.  Setting out up the street again, but looking at the right side, roughly across from the sawmill was a tiny building perhaps the size and shape of a caboose or slightly larger.  I have no idea what it was used for in its heyday, but it struck me as an office of some kind.  I recall that in and behind it there were some huge glass bottles.  Maybe ten gallons each?  Not visible from the road, but not far off in the woods behind it, there was a hunting cabin people used once in a while when I was growing up. 

The only reason I ever learned to have anything against hunting was because in hunting season, the hunters came around and made our woods potentially dangerous to us.  How dare they!  We couldn’t go out there and play normally then (well, sometimes we did anyway, just tried to dress brightly, make noise, and be obviously human), and it was even nervous-making walking to and from the bus.  Until I was much older, that was my primary impression of hunting and memory of hunting seasons.

Immediately after the small building was a larger, almost house-like one.  There was one interlude of a year or two when “the Puerto Ricans” lived there.  Those were some nice if crude guys imported and hired to work the cranberry bogs.  Apparently the building was indeed supposed to have been a house, but was never lived in as such, except for itinerant usage.  It is the only remaining one of these buildings still standing, and is the maintenance office of the mobile home park for the elderly now occupying the land I thought of as mine as a child.  There’s one way to learn about property rights.  Sadly, my family did have the opportunity to buy as much of the land as we wanted a couple times.  $400 An acre sounds so cheap, doesn’t it?  Especially given the current value upwards of $100,000 forty years later.  But it’s not so cheap when you make a couple thousand a year.

Anyway, that house-like building had a cellar with a garage door at ground level with a parking area accessed by driving down the hill the building was on.  There was a workshop-like environment in the cellar, and when I was little, my grandfather worked in there.  The one vivid memory I have is of watching him use a large, foot-operated grindstone.  Other especially vivid memories I have of him at work are riding down the road with him on a giant bulldozer toward our house, and watching him use a giant dozer with jaws to rip out a tree on the side of the island in Turkey Swamp.  No idea what was the context.  Well, that and picking cranberries, along with much of the rest of my family.  They kept cranberry equipment in that cellar, back in the day. 

They used roller things for moving cranberry boxes or something.  You know the ones?  Two metal rails, spoks in between, free-spinning metal wheels on them.  Set them up on supports, link them together as needed, and roll heavy items along them.  A&P in Bridgewater had some of those that went from the checkout area, through a flap in the front of the store, and would roll your groceries out on the contraption.  I thought it was the coolest thing.

Well, one year they had those rollers sitting around outside the maintenance building.  We, my older brother in the lead of course, used them on the hill for sliding without snow.  Whee!  Except I seem to recall being little enough to be scared.

The next thing, back up level with the road, was a pumphouse.  Our artesian well that supplied water to the house.  It was a small, slant-roofed thing, low end to the road, door on the other end, with a long flight of stairs down to the pump, and mass quantities of hornets.  That was the Best Water Ever.  The mobile home park is on town water, but last I knew they still had the well and a public faucet the residents could use to fill containers with the good water.

Next was a twin to the green garage building on the other side of the street.  The well and the green garage building were basically across from the long building.  It is that building I keep dreaming about.  I only ever went in it or saw the door of it opened a few times.  It was not a place I can recall ever hanging out.  Yet it recurs in my dreams, the ghost of a mostly forgotten building of no particular significance.  I’ll get back to it.

Finally, at the top of the hill overlooking the dropoff into the swamp, across from the little sheds, was my father’s body shop on three quarters of an acre.  He started out working on cars informally in the yard, from what I gather.  When he went into business fully, this old building, a larger army green one, was available and got him well established.  It always seemed a little odd, having the business a half mile off the beaten path, on a dirt road, but hey, it was a town of perhaps less than 3000 then, and a different time.

That building burned when I was around five, before I started school.  Amazing how vividly I remember the place.  Certainly I remember the day of the fire, and the ruins very well.  After a couple years in rented quarters elsewhere in town, he rebuilt.  No more outhouse!  The new garage had proper plumbing, and a nicer, roomier setup in general.  Sadly, that building burned too, leading to an even longer time in the wilderness.  By then the writing was on the wall both in terms of the mobile home park going up around us, and maritally, so the next rebuild - in a metal building - was on the other side of town.  The second one wasn’t there all that long, as I was no older than fifth grade when that fire happened.  It’s not as vivid.  I seem to recall it was an overnight thing and we woke to the news in the morning.  The first one I watched out a window of the second floor of my house, with my grandmother, who was crying as I don’t recall ever seeing her cry otherwise.  The image of the burned ruins, and the smell, are indelible.

Radiating out from where the house was were paths and fire roads, and there were lots of fun spots and times in the surrounding woods and such.  I’ve long thought of basing some fiction, or even not so fiction, on the place where I grew up.  Sort of the proverbial “hundred acre wood,” but larger and more diverse.  The dream and then this remembrance of some of the surroundings have reinforced that idea.

My usual dream about that old building is that I step into it and at the last second realize, or am warned by somebody with me, that there is a hole in the floor.  As far as I can recall, there was no such thing.  In the dream it’s a deep, perfectly rectangular pit, as if someone were going to put in hydraulic lift equipment.  Or a trap for the unwary building entrant.

Sometimes that is as far as it goes.  Other times the dream, pit or not, involves a stairs along the wall to the right, up to a simple attic-like second floor/loft area.  This we use as a hangout or place to explore, with varying degrees of danger.  Sometimes the floor is so rickety or incomplete, there is a danger of falling through and then on down the pit.  Sometimes it’s a near normal, almost livable quarters.  That’s as far as it usually goes.

The latest version didn’t feature the hole in the floor.  I went up to the second floor, which was nicely equipped as a place to hang out, if rather unfinished.  The whole time I was there, it was ambiguous as to whether there was any electricity.  My older brother, who has been going through a divorce, was staying there.  This wasn’t known at first.  He was there at times.  My friend Nicole and her mother were there briefly, more so her mother, who was giving us a hard time about something.  This is odd in that I have never met Nic’s mother in person.  I’ve seen a couple of pictures, and seen her from a distance.  Strange.

The main area was far bigger than it would actually have been, which is a normal thing for me in dream houses.  I specialize in variants of old houses with endless rooms full of interesting stuff.  It had a couch, a bed, some rugs and chairs.  I think my mind was trying to picture it with a pool table but never quite made one materialize.  That would match the upstairs of a barn friends of mine had finished as a hangout, complete with a bar, at their old place.

What did materialize was a door at the back end.  In reality, the door should have taken me into thin air and dropped me onto the ground ten feet below.  In fact, it went into a narrow, long room running along the back of the main one.  Down at the right end was a bed, and there was another bed closer to me.  My brother was down at the end, and this was where he apparently was staying, not in the main room as it first appeared.  This scene was probably based on my grandmother’s attic.  I found myself thinking that with all these beds, other people could crash there too if needed.  There was a lot of other junk in that room.  But wait!

To the left end was a set of stairs up.  It went to another room, a larger one like the first, only more polished.  There was at least one more bed.  I started to wonder, probably my rational mind intruding, whether the place had electricity, and if not where were all the candles or lanterns.

Finally, I discovered another door and stairs to a final floor.  That was my brother’s inner sanctum, the real place he was staying, even as he worried about find a place that was not temporary and spartan.  Beds galore, but no stoves, refrigerators, or even bathrooms were apparent.  Strange.

I don’t remember all the circumstances in the dream, since there was more to it than discovering new rooms and floors, and uncovering my brother’s secret getaway.  It was so compelling that I kept waking up, then falling back asleep into the same dream by choice.  Which doesn’t always work, but it’s cool when it does.

Anyway, that’s enough on dreams and childhood memories for now.  You may not see much from me the rest of the day, as I have work to do that by rights ought to preclude the distraction of blogging.  Much of what I posted yesterday was written the night before or earlier in the day, and time stamped to appear later.  Which annoyingly prevents both trackbacks and pings, making it harder to draw extra traffic by being prolific.  I didn’t get the same chance and inspiration to create advance posts last night, except the baby pictures.

One final thought: one of my dreams in life has always been to give my kids a yard as close as possible to the scale of the “yard” I had as a kid.  It probably won’t happen, but you can see why I would think of an acre as a very modest yard.

Update:

Deb showed me this nifty ACME Mapper tool.  This image is centered on where the house I grew up in was.  It’s not there anymore.  The main road toward the top is route 106.  The main road at the right is route 58. 

The big dark splotch to the lower left of center is a body of water that was not there when I was a kid.  Someone messed with things and caused what had been a relatively dry section of swamp to flood, killing most of the trees.

The mass of bright structures and associated roads are “mobile homes” for the elderly in a trailer mobile home park.  Except for the road my house was on, none of the roads were there.  There was what amounted to a fire road that went to the one other house in the woods, down route 106 a ways from us.

All that was woods, with the buildings I described.  The bogs are still there, though there’s been some expansion.  There’s a light splotch adjacent to the bogs where there was a wooded hill.  That was razed and dug out for sand, so it’s all barren now.  Or it was last I knew, and when this picture was taken.  I haven’t been down there in many years.  As long as my mother still had her house, we could visit there and walk down to take ourselves back to the bogs and wilder areas that remained.  When my mother lost her house in 1994, she lost that easy access to my childhood.

Update2: Added this to today’s Beltway Traffic Jam

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