last night I dreamt

I dreamt about my grandmother last night. I walked through her house and noticed all the details ~ the blue fabric on the walls of her sewing room, the tiny bright kitchen with her Fiestaware and the wheat stalks on the small glasses, her bread bin, the Ivory soap in its dish, and in the corner, the BB rifle she'd use to scare off the pigeons at the feeder (leaving the kitchen window cracked open an inch to slide the barrel out.) I dreamt I was walking by the bookshelves, the batik puffin on the wall, the crocheted owl and the huge hanging ferns. Her dressing table where she sat to brush her long white hair, achieved by age forty, and dress it into her familiar french twist.  I heard the radio, saw the cardinals outside, soaked in the orange tiger-lilies and the white alyssum, smelled the gravy for the Sunday roast. I walked down into the basement where she kept the big metal trash can filled with birdseed: each morning I'd find a mouse in it and she'd set it free outside, only to find it there again the next day. Out into the backyard to the hammock, the black-cap bushes behind the fence in the woods, the fabric clothespin bag and the evergreens.

I miss that time. I miss her.

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