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My dreamtime this morning took me back to working in a harsh construction environment. My supervisor gave me some scrap metal I didn't want to carry home, but it wasn't prudent for me to tell him I didn't want his gift. He took a Sharpie pen and wrote his permission on it in order for me to get it past the guard shack. That one piece of metal turned into a heavy bundle of different pieces of metal, like it can in dreams, before I got home. In the dream I was supposed to go back to work the next day, which was a Sunday, but there were conflicting signals about that.
In this dream, however, after having earlier dreams turn into nightmares, I finally realized I was dreaming lucidly enough to get myself off the job site, and then to will myself to come home to my house. When I got home I deposited the scrap metal over by my trash pile and came inside. Since I was still lucid by this time in the dream, I lay down on the very bed where I currently lay dreaming, and willed myself into an out of body flight to the Moon, and sat up there gazing down on the earth for a while. I woke up.
Just after I sat down to write a moment ago I heard some animals mewling and whining and barking like they do when the sirens go off and hurt their ears. They sounded like they were all the way across the river and beyond the swamp and flood plains. I'm not sure they were dogs. The sounds were not happy, carefree warning sounds. My brother's dogs started baying in sympathy with whatever it was. I got the impression they were wailing because somebody or something valuable to them died.
Not so oddly, just as I heard these animals puling, I remembered that the fortune cookie message I got yesterday. It said that a big change was going to happen in my personal life. It made me think of my youngest brother who lives next door. He has been burning off the overgrown grass and brush down the hill next to the pond. He came over to ask me if he could borrow my garden hose to add to his hose in order to reach down to the area he wanted to burn off to control the fire. I put on my shoes and went to help him.
The nozzle on my hose is about worn out, and it absolutely refused to be taken off in favor of connecting my hose to his. We used WD-40 on it to try and remove it. Nothing worked. I suggested that if he wanted to burn the area off without the water hose, I'd go down and help him keep an eye on it, but he adamantly refused to consider setting the fire without a water hose available.
I knew from the tone of his voice that he would not change his mind, so I teased him a little about being overboard on the safety aspects of it. It might have been mo' better if I hadn't done that. But, I went further and reminded him that our family had been burning off land without hoses since our childhood, but that just made him even more angry, and he snapped off a comment about "I get to have my own way occasionally!", and stomped off.
In an effort to appease his anger, I switched the lengths of hoses around so that the stuck nozzle was at the end of the three pieces of hose I had, hooked it up to the faucet outside my house, and pulled the end with the nozzle on it down toward where he had been burning. The effort had made me pretty tired, he hadn't returned, and so I came back in the house to watch the six o'clock news. Pretty soon, I received an e-mail from him saying that he had lit the fire. I got up and went down to where he was tending the fire. After all, the land he was burning off was partly mine.
When I got outside I noticed that he had rerouted the hose I had dragged down toward the pond, and when I got to where he was he was in a better mood. He said that he had finally gotten the worn-out nozzle off that had been stuck. He figured the WD-40 we had sprayed on it earlier had a chance to work. The fire burned real well in most places, but with some islands of dry grass here and there.
I stayed down at the pond with him while the fire burned. By the time the humid night air started slowing the burn I was ready to put out the fire and go inside. I subtly started saying as much, and preparing to leave it go. He had used his tractor and disk on the land beside the road higher above the pond, so there wasn't much chance it would get out of control. I told him to let me know when he had enough and I would turn the water to the hose off at my house.
Some time went by, maybe an hour or so. I heard his tractor running, so I figured he had called it a night. When I didn't hear from him for about an hour I assumed he had forgotten to let me know to cut the water off. I went outside and called out to him a couple of time, but got no answer. He was close enough that he could have heard me yelling, so I went ahead and turned off the faucet the hose was attached to and came back upstairs.
The truth is that I was very tired. I had gotten up early, didn't get the nap I'd planned to make up for it, and was ready to go to bed. When I got up to go pee later, I found another e-mail from his iPhone that he was still down there, but it had arrived at my computer two hours earlier. I guess he had came by my house and turned the water back on while I was asleep.
The next morning after it got light enough to see what had happened with the burning, I walked down to the pond. It looked like he had gotten a clean burn on much of the area he had wanted to burn off. I was pleased for him and came back to the house to write yesterday's blog entry. He piddled around down there off and on all day. I went to check on his progress a couple of times, and found him using his tractor to re-pile the unburned heavy tree branches.
Just after dark last night I headed over to his house to see if he wanted to walk like we've begun doing for the last month or so. I saw his truck lights moving on the lane we both use as a driveway going toward his house. But, instead of going home he drove toward the area he'd been burning. I followed him down there on foot. He didn't see me as I approached.
When I arrived, he had a flashlight out checking the still smoldering pile of fallen tree branches he had raked up. There was a fairly strong wind blowing, and that was his concern. I stepped behind his truck where he couldn't see me, and when he came back and opened the truck door to drive back to his house I growled like an animal. It scared him, of course, and then when he realized it was me we had a good laugh.
Instead of driving his truck the three hundred yards or so to his house, he suggested we start walking from there in order for him to return to check on the fire again. As we walked I began asking him how his life was going. I asked about his wife's health and how they were getting along. He assured me that everything was great. He even volunteered that there had been an agreeable pick up in his internet business for a few weeks. I took his word for it and we finished our walk. The dogs howling the night before must have been about something else entirely.
The reason I'm up and writing at this ungodly hour is that the expected rain started pouring down. It is surely welcome. Not only to put out any remaining sparks from the brush burning, but to take the spring pollen out of the air, at least for a while. The yellow pollen that comes from the abundant pine trees in the area had coated my car and I had to use the window washer along with the windshield wipers to clear it off well enough to see. Since my sinuses have been killing me with all the pollen, I was glad to hear the rains come.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
