Today’s #reverb10 prompt wants to know what I have come to appreciate most this year and how do I express my gratitude for it. (Thanks Victoria Klein).

One word: TIME.

With my new dedication to my work, along with my family additions, time has compressed itself into carefully negotiated nuggets. On weekends, when Colin and I occasionally stumbled across an hour or two of unplanned time, we usually find ourselves wondering around in it.

No, that isn’t a typo. I do mean WONDERING!

The Time Tango

This year, time materialized in all the small projects I desired to do and the places I wanted to be: Turkey Bingos and Game Nights and lazy summer afternoons at the pool; recycling events and coat drives and knitting groups.

Time poked at me whenever I gazed out at the weedy, overgrown garden that needed planting, and picking, and watering and just a friendly visit.

Time brushed by me and said “well I’ve got plans: places to be and people to see. Are you coming or what?”

Time goaded me into planning parties I didn’t want to have, then guilted me out of those I wished I could attend.

Time showed me middle age in the mirror, woven with lines and grey hair. Then Time said kindly that it would be OK if I took an extra bit of him to drive to Norwalk for a nice haircut now and then.

On those rare hours when we were alone together in the house, Time covered me with the fleece throw. Then he tossed his friend Caution to the breeze, lifted my feet onto the coffee table and whispered sweetly: “Go ahead, sweetheart. Waste me!”

Time dragged his feet up the hill of responsibility, then coasted madly back down the other side, remembering suddenly that youth is a state of mind.

Time plotted activities on calendars and measured itself in tablespoons and inches. It  multi-tasked: it reminded me I can fold the laundry while the pumpkin pie bakes. I can chase and play while I rake. I can knit and watch TV.

Of course Time made sure I made it to yoga. At least once a week anyway. Time gave me some space. He waited in the car for me and played with my iPhone.

Best of all, Time laid down and rested at the end of day. He put his aside the insistent, linear drive toward death. Instead he got drunk on the brain’s capacity to tumble through unbounded space.

Time went wandering in dreamland.

(My pics were captioned by an awesome app called “Photo Notes Free: Captions for iPhone and Facebook.”)

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“So tell me your dream
Lay your head on my pillow
Tell me the things that you hide away
Your pain
Your pleasure
Your sorrow
Tell me the things that you hide away
Your pain your pleasure your sorrow.”
–Blue Rodeo

If you are looking for the less fortunate, you can find them waiting in long lines outside the St Charles rescue mission on East Main on Bridgeport.

If you are looking for a shade different than the golden hues of the New England Gateway, you can stand in line for a free turkey too. And a plastic bag of miscellaneous groceries, with which you will have to make do.

Whose dreams are filled with Stove Top stuffing? Whose childhood memories taste like canned corn and potato buds?

The old man with half a missing ear kissed and blessed me today. I dreamed I found a way to inject my many spare blessings into his empty cupboards.

In Westport, this morning,  you could trade a turkey for tickets to see Taylor Hicks  in Grease. What morsel of entertainment could we dine on any other holy day?

Forget the thanks. Lean on giving. Forget the holy. Remember the day. Remember the day-to-day dreams.

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On the road, in a car, weaving through the hills, we listened alternately to the sound of radio palpitating, or the body sounds the car spewed coughs or chuckles, the careening of hot tires communing with pavement.

That tree flying is a Norway maple, twisting toward the sunlight– just the same as the one, still and sturdy, next the garage. The tree whose leaves open and bend and weep to the ground before our eyes, every year, then rot in dark piles in deep woods, while we run from work to school to food and bed, and back.

These hills here don’t know what people say about them– they believe they are unmoving, holding the houses carefully still and letting the grass shoot up from its breast. These hills have forgotten that once they were shoved around by the glaciers, and they have no idea that everyone who thinks they are someone use the same rolling cliche to describe their purple stillness.

That stripmall–now here, now gone– is made of broken asphalt and is  silently being eaten by carpenter ants. Any strip mall, all the stores look the same, but his mask hides the secret:  those ants, filing in, day after day, pulling food and goods off the shelves, diligent as the noon day sun. Though they  look the same, but they each paint dreams of another kind of day. They imagine drudgery in a softer form.

And we curl around the hills — north to go south — and the garden, the garden in the yard that I tended, is left behind for the week (or the year), and we are listening to the radio palpitating, soothing us, reassuring us the deer, and the crabgrass, and creeping charlie, will look after it while we are away.

–For J.W.

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In my dream last night I was following Dr. Who (David Tennant) and some friends to an alternate universe.

Since it was a dream, it was alot like a Dr. Who episode, with strange creatures and great gaping caverns. We transported through reams of paper and The Doctor was his effervescent self.

My favorite part of the dream was our visit to an amusement park, where my sister Ann and I climbed straight away onto the roller coaster. I am not much of a roller coaster lover in real life, or at least in this universe. But in my parallel dream universe, on the other side of the ream of paper, I hopped right into the car, fearless, tossed aside my can of Coke, and went for a ride.

I remember my dreams all the time. During the last three years, when I was unsettled and my hormones were amok, I didn’t sleep well. As a result, my dreams were always just on the other side of the surface, ready to greet me the instant I stumbled off into sleep.

This was my first dream of The Doctor, but I am wondering if he was always there, calling to me, sending me messages, and I just needed to get on the roller coaster to reach him.

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