Last night, I had a dream of being home at Christmas. I visited my childhood home and a few other places, some real and some imagined. Of those which I have visited before, there is the area that my home was in, the roads of my childhood and adolescence, a time and place in which I dreamed about the world outside and of leaving home. It’s funny how much time is spent traveling, and thinking in those in between moments, the anticipation of arriving. How often those moments are when on holidays, headed to or returning home from seeing family. There are the road marks, the signposts we pass that cut the journey into sections as we get closer, and then closer, and then even closer to the destination, with the butterflies of excitement to arrive or the warm, slow relief of the return. I remember the tiny hamlet of six houses halfway to Trenton from Highland, on the way to Gramma’s house and the beautiful landscapes of that last leg of the journey, with distant trees in fields and the long winter sun. The old town square before that, and the Walmart before that. The bleakness of the old shopping center across from there that even then, I noticed. How depressing it was, that that was all there was to do, to see. There was a little bandstand that we would pass after that, in front of some type of government building stationed far to the rear of it. A remnant of a time before the big box stores, I imagine that it would have greeted you as you came into town. Before that even, we would have passed a few of those tiny, old-fashioned oil pumps that dotted the farm fields, sometimes pumping, sometimes still – I would always check to see what they were up to. There was the small, abandoned missile silo, down and to the side of the road before the four-way-stop, a solo flashing red light which hung over the crossroads that felt like the actual middle of nowhere. Before all of that was my favourite spot of all. After watching the telephone lines pass by, rhythmically bobbing up and down like a buoy from the backseat car window, after field upon field, after crossing the train tracks with the hump where my stomach would flip, where I’d imagined Lincoln’s ghost train would pass through, on the first frost night of fall, after all of that, the lonesome abandoned house would arrive. It was a simple, one-story wooden frame house. It looked like a child’s drawing made real except it had no door and you could see right through it to the field in the back. It was almost painful to see. Once someone had built this house, lived there, probably farmed there, and now they and everyone else they had known were no longer, all of their things we gone, and no one even cared enough to fix that door. I would dream about going there, a prairie girl in a full, long dress with the wind blowing through the house and through my hair. But I never did.
Once old enough, on these roads I would drive in my car, an old white VW rabbit, to and from the town where I went to high school, through the streets and on the highways of St. Louis, and on the interstate between my childhood home in the woods and the city. In only half an hour, I could travel to another state, another world. Even earlier, as a child, when we would go to visit our family ‘on the other side of the river’, I was always amazed by the immediate and drastic change in geography between Illinois and Missouri. Our side was flat, as flat as you could imagine, so that if the road were straight, as many of them were, you could see forever in the distance. The entire state was one big plane, so even small hills felt like mountains. Missouri couldn’t have been more different. As the highway emptied off the bridge and onto the elevated ramps, you could see the cut-through rock formations which had been blasted to make way for the roads, hundreds of feet high, of raw and jagged rock – such a shocking and impressive change that signalled we were somewhere else. There were also the old, genteel buildings to admire, once the elevated highways passed you through through ‘the city’, with its poorly built row houses, fast-food and diners, and poverty. This sense of history and of a world outside of my own story intrigued me even then.
I was home for Christmas, in my dream, going through the architecture and the decoration of my past, literally and figuratively. It was one of those early dark nights, wet and chilly, but with cosy fires and furnaces inside. This kind of heat only exists in America, for what reason I do not know. In this dream I visited a new apartment of a family member, in a metropolitan area, a city, that I’ve imagined in my dreams before. This city is a blend of places I’ve known and places that do not exist at all, as the places that I build in my dreams usually are. Here there are parts of the downtown area of St. Louis, by the Old Union Station complex that had become a mall. I imagine it now as again slightly dilapidated. This downtown is small, the streets from here pass through a mix of Sullivan-style government buildings and post-modern shiny corporate facades and lead down to the riverside and the park next to The Arch. There you can find a mix of bad highway overpasses and on-ramps, parking garages that extend skyward and create pockets of undesirability. If you take the right on-ramp here, or if you are coming over the river-bridge from 55, you can quickly escape to the nice part of town, towards Forest Park, and the Art Museum. It is along here that I’ve imagined a place that does not exist, a quarter that feels from a film, one in which St. Louis is a place of historic charm, hidden groves, and a legacy and mysteriousness of French Catholicism. To get here you turn right off of the highway, and right again, to arrive at a place with large trees and cafes on a couple of old cobblestone streets, tucked back next to a hidden canal. You must park here and walk down, and on the edge of this neighbourhood to the left, you’ll find a cafe attached to a docked barge, with those old-fashioned string lights over the outside dining. This place wasn’t necessarily in last night’s dream but it felt important to write about it nonetheless.
In another part of my town was this new apartment and I visited on a cold and rainy winter’s night at Christmastime. When you walk in the door, on the facing wall there is a familiar painting, the one of a red barn and a single crow mid-flight. I believe my Dad made this painting. It is beautiful and sad, and quite striking. The apartment is several floors up and quite modern, with a feeling of yellow-beige warmth throughout. You could see the streets below through streaked, wet windows, and the Christmas lights, even the stoplights, looked like pretty paintings. This part of the city is to the north-east of where I’ve just told you about, and I can say this as for some reason when I dream of places I have a sense of where they are situated in regards to the others. It had the feel more of Chicago, or DC than St. Louis, but it is in fact in that same imaginary city.
Then again somehow I was home, in the house of my childhood, but it looked modern now too, decorated sparsely in blue and white. There was no clutter, nor personal things. It was clean and peaceful, spacious and calm. I almost didn’t recognise it. The two wood burning stoves were there, but not in the right place. They were one right next to the other, with spacing that didn’t make sense. Now I realise to that my father was there and that I was asking him why he didn’t finish it, finish the house. He wasn’t very good at answering, and me, being a woman, my mother’s daughter, me, I talked too much in his place, leaving not much space for a response. I gestured at the unfinished kitchen bar to find that one of the two stoves was in its place. This was when I started to realise that something was off, and that perhaps I was dreaming. Then I realised that something else was off, the carpet that stretched along the other side of the great room. It was a solid blue, cut as a large rug, long but jagged along the edges, like it had been a scrap from a factory, or a mistake. It too was unfinished, and it made me feel very frustrated. My feelings of perfectionism resurfaced and the loss of control around them, too. I think then I made myself wake up.
For the life of me, no matter how hard I now try, I cannot remember if the bar was really there, in real life. If it were, It would have been usually covered in papers and mess, and I would have dreamed sitting at it on a stool and having breakfast served. Maybe I don’t remember it because it’s too upsetting, or maybe it was never finished, so there is nothing to remember at all. I will have to ask my mother about it.
My dream was like a movie, jumping from location to location and back again, with things happening in each location – the car, the roads, the apartment, and the house – but with no real story. Just like in life, we go places, we see people, and things just happen. Yet these places where everything plays out are seared our minds, our unconsciousness, or at least in mine. I always hope that one day I can remember every detail, especially of my grandmother’s house, as it was such a haven, a magical place for me. There were things I don’t think I ever even noticed, as I was so young and her house was so full of things. I do hope that the images are burned in my mind like real photographs are to old paper – permanent, lasting, unchangeable – and that someday I might be able to return to them to see every detail again.
For now I sit here the day after Christmas, after having made it all happen to schedule, and try to just be in the quiet and to hear the thoughts and memories of the last few days that have gone unnoticed, as I didn’t have time to notice them, as I was busy making new memories for myself and my family. There are all those feelings and thoughts of Christmases passed, of the family members I loved and those I didn’t like very much at all, even as a child. How I did think that it would always be good, that nothing would ever change, except for the better. How wonderfully näive I was but I guess that is the beauty of being a child, of every year feeling so monumental, of growing towards being grown. But then what? I never once though of how my Grandmother might feel, of who she might be missing, thinking of and remembering on that day, while she was making magic for everyone else. What was she protecting us all from? Was it the lack and pain of her own childhood? The emptiness and sorrow of a man scarred from war? Perhaps she was just happy to be able to do it all, having had nothing of her own really when she was small, having had to take care of herself and her siblings when her mother died young. Maybe she was living out her own dream of an abundant, stable home.
This dream is not unlike my own, which I act out now for my family but also for myself. Mostly for myself, perhaps, and I am okay with that. I deserve to feel stable, to feel loved, to feel surrounded by others who can enjoy just simply being together, being included and who might otherwise feel alone and unloved at Christmas. I dreamed of a full house at Christmas, of magical moments where childhood dreams come true so that if even for just a moment, I and my children feel special and seen in a way that can only happen at Christmas. It is a gift to myself – to feel like I can feel good by making others feel good and feel seen, and to make this feeling matter in the world. Maybe this is what my Grandmother felt too, at Christmas. Maybe I inherited it from her.
Notes on My Life 