dream launcher
by bam
not everyone gets to go back. but i do.
to the window where i watched the night. watched the morning come. watched the storms thrash the trees.
to the window, in the room, where i grew up.
i can, if i want to, retrace my finger along the ledge. flop down on the same twin bed, still covered with the same patchwork quilt, the one i studied as i lay awake in the morning, picking which swatch i would want to see unfurled in yards and bolts of calico.
i can, if i want to, stare up into the same old oaks, the same old sky, and the linden that split in half, one stormy night when it nearly fell on my room, fell on me, tossing like the trees.
i can if i want to, fall asleep there again, count stars, pick out mercury, hovering, over by the weather vane, not far out the window.
i can because i still have a key to the house. because my mama still lives there, wouldn’t think of moving. wouldn’t think of leaving behind the garden she has planted, tended, defended, arranged and re-arranged as if the garden was her living room, i’m telling you. she moves peonies and iris and ostrich ferns the way some folks haul a couch across the rug, re-hang a picture.
sometimes, when we are there for sunday supper, or for hotdogs after the fourth of july parade, i climb the stairs when no one’s around. i go back. i check on things out my window.
i might flop down on my bed, being careful, always, not to muss the quilt. i am old enough now to know those quilts are art, a fact that mostly escaped me when i was little, when i might have been harsh on the teeny-tiny stitches that, except for me, have withstood 100-some-odd years.
the curtains no longer are the ones i loved when i was little. those were swiss. white on white. french knots and chain stitches. vines and blossoms and little buds, climbing up the sheer white cotton. i thought it exotic, i really did, that my curtains came from switzerland. the swiss know lace, i remember being told. i think that made me puff my chest, just a little, knowing i was a girl who had swiss curtains hanging at my windows.
oh, i had two. two windows. one looked east, into the trees and the old orphanage next door, where hippies or roosters, or both, would cause a mighty ruckus, from dawn ’til deep into the night. and one looked south, beyond the rooster, this one metal, black-painted metal, who spun with the wind, over to the woods and the willows of the green pond, where i tiptoed out on logs, stirred a stick through the green slime, watched it whirl, make ripples, tried to catch a frog.
i loved the green pond.
between my windows and the pond, i was pretty much destined to be a dreamer.
of all the frames of all the reels of my growing up, those would be the ones where i am all alone, becoming. as the one girl in a house of boys, on a winding dead-end street populated–no, ruled–mostly by boys on sting ray bikes, i would say the refuge and the possibility offered by those two places, the window, the pond’s edge, were most essential.
a girl–and a boy, too–needs a place where it can be just you and your dreams. children, if they’re lucky, seem to have a knack for sniffing out a dreaming place.
i cannot imagine a growing up without dreaming. i don’t think, in all the existential equations, you can really do your growing, if you don’t do your dreaming.
it’s why my window calls me. still. it’s why i often tiptoe up my mother’s wooden stairs. cock my head. look out. see if all the dreams i birthed there, and some of the stories too, might come spilling back.
those window panes have been the frame for many, many scenes in the unspooling of my life. some dreamed, others very real.
it’s the glass that boxed the blurry stars, the ones i saw through tears that would not end, on the night my papa died. but it’s the screen i looked through, too, on the afternoon of my garden wedding. i was up there, dressed just like a bride, and i peeked down on the scene of so many long-ago nights of tag and makeshift camping tents. i saw my old backyard dressed up, gussied just like me, all white and waiting for a wedding.
i brought my newborn baby to that room. held him up to the window. tried to make the leaves soothe his crying. the way they’d so often soothed mine.
it is a tingly blessed thing that that window is still there. is still within my reach. not everyone can go back to the place where all their dreams were launched.
but i can.
and i know that makes me blessed.
can you still go back to your bedroom window? was it the place that birthed your dreams, or was your place beneath the stairs, or beside a creek? did you ache when your bedroom window was sold to someone else? or worse, knocked down by a wrecking ball? a crashing end that comes too often in these demolition days.
I can still go back to my bedroom of 53 years ago, as my father is still in the house. When I am in one of the bedrooms, I recall looking out the window at night in October 1957 when I was nearly 4, with one of my parents pointing to see the Russian’s Sputnick moving overhead. In the fear of the Cold War and the Space Race, it was even scary for me, a pre-schooler, to see that something from Russia was overhead. When I am in the bedroom of my teens (which I just stayed in for a weekend in June) I point out to my children the window that opens to a lower roof, where I clipped wires on the gutter to get my hand-made transistor radio (9th grade science project) to play in the dark after bedtime.
that is amazing, the same bedroom, or at least the same house–the shuffling of bedrooms always a thrill, although as the only girl in a house of many boys, i stayed put–since you were born. you must win some prize in the rarest of rare clubs, those who lived in the same house their whole growing-up years. i moved to mine, the one i claim as my official room, the summer after kindergarten. so while i was there for all of the essential years, i was not there for ALLLLLLLL the years.i love that you were building your own transistor radio. even more i love that you were listening in the dark. i also love the slice of history as seen through a bedroom window. sputnick? transistors? nowadays it would be a satellite dish, and a cellphone dropped in that gutter. but still the same sun and moon. before, beyond….ever, always, we can only hope.
Oh my, what gorgeous writing … scrumptious, a feast. How very blessed you are. Many of us have the memories, but no window to visit again. Hug your mama for me the next time you visit your room.
I cannot return to the bedroom of my childhood without an invitation or a knock at the front door. It was in that room that I could lie in bed and watch the birch trees bend, it seemed almost to the ground, whenever a strong wind blew through the woods.When I was seventeen-years-old my parents sold the house that my grandfather had built for them. We moved out on the same day that I mailed my early-decision application in for college. Somehow as I was focused on the future, it didn’t seem quite right that my past was being taken away ever so quickly. My parents did not move to another city or town, they just had another house built just up the hill from our first house. I miss the old house, how it was heated by a wood furnace, seemed so sound proof and safe and had the most wonderful hiding spots. It also had a central vac system, which provided us with many mischeveous opportunities to see what toys could go through the system (please don’t tell my parents!) When I return to my parents current house on a cold winter’s night look down the hill through the bare trees and see the lights of our old house. Some days I want to trapse through the woods and peak in the windows to see if the house is like it remains in my memory.
Barbara, that was an extra beautiful entry today, thank you. and yes I too, can still go to the bedroom widow of my youth.I took photos as a teen from the vantage point of the window so as not to forget the trees, I can still here them on a cool summersevening swaying and talking to each other, even though the window I am now near has a maple and not an oak. thanks again for reminding us all of the small things that are really everything.
I miss my yellow bedroom with lace curtains (not Swiss) around a window looking out at a tree, a tree so large I could only see its trunk. I spent probably years sitting at that window looking out. Not much of a view, but that room was my refuge in the ordinary way a room can be for a rather tortured and oversensitive young girl. My dreams were as tangled up in the lace as much as they were bound up in the view. That lace has come with me all these years, which is a good thing, because not so long ago a young family bought my father’s house of more than 40 years, pledging to be as happy in it as was my father and his family. They just needed to expand it a little. A little knocking down here and there turned inexplicably into a complete demolition, followed by a six-foot chain link fence and a for sale sign, much to the horror of the neighbors. As far as I know it is still a bulldozed lot, but at least they kept the big tree intact. As for me, I felt sad–our house wasn’t THAT bad, didn’t deserve that treatment. My more bitter brother had a different attitude, insisting that nobody deserved to live there but us anyway, and now nobody ever would. It is certainly true that no one can inhabit our dreams in quite the way we can, no one can gaze outward in quite the same way. The gazing and the dreaming is all our own, and those windows can stay with us in our dreams, surrounded by the same old lace.