eor | (no subject)

As I was drifting off to sleep last night I had a dream I was ice skating with one of you. Which one doesn't really matter because it was that standard fantastical dream that doesn't particularly stick to the standards of reality. And fantastic it was. The music (which was in reality playing through my headphones at the time) was "The American Wake" from the Riverdance CD. I was skating with the energy and playfulness of Elvis Stojko, but with the smoothness and grace of Michelle Kwan. The venue was an ice arena similar to the one butonquail used to practice in, but this one had more wood construction and a slightly lower ceiling. The arena was deserted, except for maybe a couple people changing. But on the ice were just two playing and dancing. It was a lot of fun.

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Just before I woke up this morning I had another dream. This one took place on one of the local islands, which had become gentrified. I was walking along in the winter time. In the first frames I ended up walking into some slush and getting my feet soaked. This is worrisome because I was not going to be home or in a warm place for quite a while, but there wasn't much I could do about it so I walked on.

I met one of the local teenagers who was outside and bored. I'm not quite sure how, but we struck up a conversation about one of the houses along the street. It wasn't any ordinary house. The rest of the houses on the street fell into the two categories of island houses, small little places squeezed in together that were camps, possibly winterized and posh island houses of the wealthy. The former were mostly gone, the later were in abundance. This house was neither.

It took a minute to figure out. Whoever built this house had no sense of how you are supposed to build a house, but an infinite sense of art. The wall facing the street had one window high up, but it wasn't a double hung, it was just a window, not quite square, with no particular frame. The wall was comprised of wood, but at different places it flowed from clapboard, to shingle to what looked like the round ends of branches, to completely intact still living branches flowing out of the wall to form an awning. The front steps were rough, log cabin style logs that led up to a porch, but in the middle of the porch was a cupola, because the space under the porch had been converted into a partially subterranean room. Each exterior wall of the room had a different construction method and finish. Somehow all this architectural madness flowed and worked together.

I was trying to explain why this house was cool to the teenager when the heads of an old man and woman appeared in the high window. He started yelling at us in the way old men yell at people who are on there property. The teenager bolted in the way that teenagers do. In between the old man's shouts I shouted back to him that I was admiring his house and had just spent ten minutes analyzing the construction of the front porch. When he realized what I was saying, he stopped shouting, disappeared from the window and was soon coming around the left side of the house, offering to take me on a tour.

As we went around the side of the house I was confronted by all manner of vegetables that he had put aside (obviously my dream self had forgotten that this is the dead of winter and vegetables don't keep outside well in those conditions). We went around back as the old man talked about where he bought this provision or that. I was trying to remember them all because he obviously knew where the best produce and deals could be had.

Once inside I was stunned. The house was plain to the point of colonial times. No windows in the first room I came into and no, or almost no furniture.

The inside was laid out in square rooms divided along a central wall. There was no hallway, just doorways leading from room to room. But the doorways weren't quite doorways. You see doorways require doors or at least door frames, these had neither. The walls were papered and where a door was needed the paper hung loosely in front of an opening about three feet high.

Somehow my host moved through these opening swiftly though he was close to six feet tall. I was left to grope and marvel my way through.

As I crawled my way through the short opening I came into a sitting room where my host and his wife had a tea cart and tea prepared.

Then I woke up.