Dreams and Rain

Another funny dream I had: I’m talking to some friend online from a laptop in the middle of a mowed field. I’m surrounded by a suburban neighborhood identical to the one I grew up in. The guy I am talking to tells me to call him on the phone. As I speak to him from my cell, I see him come out of his house across the field on a cordless, and walk over to say hi. I get in contact with a second friend from online and we all decide to hang out. One of them has a car, and we start driving, to pick up other people, friends of my new friends, as we go somewhere. I think I kissed one of them in the car.

Five minutes into the car ride, two guys and a girl in the back seat pull out spoons and a plastic bag, then begin snorting cocaine. One of them complains of having a dry mouth but nobody has any water. Then I woke up.

The night before last I had another dream involving the dog: my grandpa wanted to cut the dog’s tail off. “Oh, it always gets caught on things” he’s telling me, and I’m trying to convince him not to do it. He takes the dog into the bathroom anyway and slices her tail off with a knife, and she doesn’t flinch. She just goes on her happy way with half a bloody tail, the severed piece flipping and twitching like a lizard’s cut-off tail in the bathtub.

Today is cold. Yesterday was warm and sunny, to the point that long pants and a t-shirt would have felt extremely uncomfortably hot and stuffy. Today it’s rainy, damp, and chilly. There is a saying in Colorado, “if you don’t like the weather here, wait five minutes.” That’s a slight exaggeration, but there is some truth at the heart of the expression. The air dropped at least thirty degrees overnight. Fall here is extremely short, with a summer that blends directly into winter. The first hard frost knocks off most of the leaves on the trees while they’re still green, to be followed by a few more weeks of hot summer again. Or different trees will turn at different times, and sometimes different parts of a single tree will turn at different times, as one branch will be naked while the other fully green, giving a sense of discombobulation to the world. I had actually been looking forward to the first damp cold front of Autumn, because it kicks off the trees turning yellow and I get to wear my fall clothes instead of the same five pairs of shorts again and again. But as I look out the window at the chilly gray rain I already miss warmer weather. I love long summer days and big thunderheads with rolling thunder, heavy torrents of fresh, clean rain and deep, clear nights of millions of shining stars, where you can lay on the ground with the heat of the summer’s day now rising out of the Earth to to be returned to the sky and providing just the right amount of warmth for you to forget the air gently stirring around you. Now we’re in for eights months to come without a truly hot day. Mid-spring will bring cheerful sunny mornings, flowers and pale green new growth, crocuses peeping up early through black soil and white snow, but the air will still be chilly until May. I sometimes find the cool, crisp Autumn days to be inspiring, standing under the layered honeylocust treetops of Colorado’s distorted fall: green-leaved branches on the bottom, with yellow and green mottled together next, and on the top the twigs have already gone bare and the few remaining leaves have turned brown, where they will bravely stick it out (no pun intended) all winter. For me there is a strong connection between weather and memory, and such stimulation makes me think of all the Autumn days I have been through in years past. It helps me write, and for that I can enjoy it. My only qualm with colder weather is that it lasts so damn long.