Convergence
LAST night I dreamed of my grandmother’s house, the way I last saw it when it was
still one of three perched on the edge of the windswept prairie at the north end of
town. The way it was before the developers gobbled up the land: carving streets and
building post-World War II houses, until 1021 Second Street NE was just another
house in an ordinary 1950s small town neighborhood.
The dream began with the sound of an old rotary lawn mower pushed by my
crusty bachelor uncle, across and around the property at dusk, just as he had done all
the years of my childhood. As the place came clear in my view, I saw that the trees
had grown tall, shading the house. The one-car garage that I knew had been built long
after I left South Dakota had disappeared, leaving a wide expanse of green lawn
framing Grandma’s cement bird bath on the north and disappearing into the
manicured back yard. I could clearly see the tangled version of an English garden
across the lot at the west, all the way to where it ended in the eight-foot lilac hedge
still as green and perfect as ever.
The old house, its unique gray stucco disguising the original ugliness of an
ancient two-bedroom wood frame cottage, was as I remembered it, with its bright
green slab door secured with a hand-carved wooden latch and latigo latch string. For
whatever reason, in my dream I was not interested in the inside of the house, only the
property itself. Somehow I knew that nobody was inside. No grandmother, no old
maid aunties awaiting their princes to arrive on white horses.
There was only my uncle, still pushing the clackety old lawn mower. The
austere, unknowable bachelor uncle of my childhood, with whom I might have
exchanged half a dozen words in the sixteen years or so that I knew him. In that
peculiar manner of dreaming, part of my conscious mind wondered – why him, and
why now? The rest of me remained absorbed in the experience, drinking in the quiet
beauty of the place, marveling that my grandfather, with no money, but with great
artistry, had taken that sow’s ear of a tumble down shack, strengthened its foundation,
added rooms front and back to serve his ever-expanding family, and created a home
of unique character.
Standing there, I am suddenly conscious of my uncle’s presence beside me. He
is as I remember him: short, stocky, balding, middle-aged and bespectacled, except
that this time he seems sincerely interested in the adult I have become. Slipping his
arm around my waist, he points to the top of one of the tall pine trees where a pair of
cardinals is perched, not quite hidden behind the cones.
“What happened to the garage?” I ask, pointing to the spot where I had been
told it had been built.
“Mold and dampness got it,” he replies. “And that tree that fell across it in a
summer windstorm. I don’t need it anyway; I don’t drive all that much anymore.”
He turns to me, seeing me as an adult, perhaps for the first time. “And you,” he
asks, “What brings you here?”
“I don’t know,” I reply. “But I’m glad I came.”
“So am I,” he says.
We continue to stand there together, comfortable in each other’s presence,
enjoying the beautiful property with its treasure trove of family memories. And I
realize that his arm around me is drawing me back into the family I had long ago
forsaken – this quiet, taciturn, very private man who in life barely acknowledged my
existence, lost in his own bachelor world.
As the picture fades, I wake, realizing that I have again been visited by
someone from “across the bridge.” This visitor is one I never expected, and I find
myself wondering why. Does my uncle often meet his virtually unknown nieces and
nephews when he comes to care for the family home that shaped so many years of his
apparently lonely life?
Or does he simply come to mow the lawn?