In my someday dreams, I have a home in the country, a small place to tuck littles to bed into under fields swathed in gold. There are chickens outside and the ground is dirt soft, wild green grass thick with patches of wildflowers, the perfect place to run barefoot at dusk. I have windows that let in the sun and fresh flowers in each room. It's painted white and there is a swing to rock back and forth on and talk as the evening dwindles. Outside there is room to yell and laugh and sing because the sky cannot protest. Inside it is quiet and cozy and content. The attic leaks when it rains and the cellar smells like sage and we're always missing a scrabble tile or two. Coffee drips continually into cups ringed with circles and there is a perpetual pot of tea on the stove. We eat apples from our trees and pick carrots, tomatoes, peas fresh from the garden. The table is wood. The chairs are mismatched. The socks are patched. The curtains are linen and the bedrooms small. But we are together and we know the taste of laughter.
These are a few of my dreams.
I wake up in the middle of a home surrounded not by sky or earth but other houses. Other lives stitch themselves into the pattern of your own. Everywhere you go, whatever you do, you cannot help but tweak, pull, tangle, change the string next door. But there is beauty to that. There are no backyards, there is one backyard. Everyone congregates in the middle, going from home to home to say hello or to see if others would like to bike across the neighborhood. We borrow tape and return gluesticks borrowed the time before, walk eggs over for recipes in kitchens that are one short. There are runs to the store that happen and drives to town for coffee or frozen yogurt. And in the evenings, there is always noise, loud laughter, names being called, the thumping of feet on the ground.
Someday will be here soon enough. In the meantime, I am learning to be content in this neighborhood home, right here.
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