� To dream or not to? � 2003-10-14 � 9:35 p.m. �
It was so vivid, I wish I had a palette and a brush to show you... it was so real I could feel the goosebumps grow and shrink on my flesh.
I walked beside my grandmother, the one I never knew... in a place that isn't where the living walk.... and I knew I shouldn't have been there.
A stunning woman, she stood before me in alabaster skin. Her hair rampant in curls - fire red. Eyes large and grey, blue-green... not at all what I remember her as... not ill... not rough... Instead of the 72 year old I last saw when I was a child, she wasn't more than fifty. Beautiful in her form... in her self...
I walked rumaging through her things... as I do sometimes even know when I am home... looking in wonder at the gems of the 30's, 40's, and 50's. She was perfect Hepburn... every bit of her spilled style... and she smelled of expensive perfume...
She watched me like a hawk on a mouse as I stumbled around her... in a world that was far more hers than mine... she watched as I touched everything... the texture of antiquity in my palms... I was in wonder... I could recall every inch of her vanity to you in detail. If I had both the energy and the time, I would.
She spoke softly... half in rhyme as she tried to explain that she wasn't living... but somehow, still wasn't dead... that she had brought with her everything material she loved about her life... and that she sometimes returns to the living world for the things she has forgotten... mostly when we're not around.
She said it is in the Lunn blood... that it runs thick and every sole girl born in the Lunn line would live the same life after death... forever returning to her life in repentance, to be seen as she should have been.
I was a little frigethened... maybe weary as I picked up a Mother's Day Card my mother wrote for her back in 1962... she touched my hand gently with polished red, wonderfully manicured nails and said "Child, these sort of things are worth more than gold... more than breath, even. I cherish them." and she placed it down again... lips drawn thin - her disturbance obvious now...
She turned to me, and to my mother who was standing close beside me... she looked at us both with a face like a china doll she said firmly...
"I lived my life misrepresented. Don't Darling, live the same way."
That in itself doesn't seem so frightening... but I explained this dream in finest detail to my mother tonight... everything I touched, and smelled... everything I saw... i called back to her...
I described the woman before me... identically as her mother in her forties... from the style of dress to her presenation... The room I stood in familiar and the furniture was the furniture she owned then...
I told Mum of a perfume bottle collection she had on a vanity... sitting on a gold and mirror bottomed tray... arranged in height... and I told her of a green bottle with a pointed top and gold detail... shinny gold, but chisled.
Mum dug a box out of her attic last week and put some things she found on a shelf in the bathroom... she stood tonight, with the very same green perfume bottle in her hands as I sat across country and told her about it.
I have never seen this perfume bottle in my life... I don't have a clear recollection of this woman's face, let alone the way she held herself and I can say with all confidence I was NEVER in her bedroom in the 1950's... and have no way of knowing her bedroom like a map...
Unless I was truly there last night.
I don't believe in this sort of thing, Maman, but whatever you want to tell me, I am listening.
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