I just woke up from a dream where I was in my grandma’s old house on the ranch. I was in the basement in the top bunk of the bedroom with the hot-lava colored carpet, under a new blanket, noticing the spiderwebs in the corners of the ceiling and barn-wood covered wall. I asked the girl in the bed next to me, someone I knew in the dream but don’t know in the real world, how strange it is to feel like you’re nine-years-old again when you’re in your gramma’s house. And then I flicked a spider off my covers and walked across the hallway to the next room to find that my daughters had been there, they had set up a school-room for their dolls, using the nightstand and the bed with the scratchy comforter.  The dolls were lined up neat in the space and I scanned my eyes across each one and then I cried.

There are places I can only visit now in my dreams, but it seems I go this little house more than any other place in my memory.

We had a childhood friend who we lost in an accident a few years out of high school. He loved to work on cars and had the neatest handwriting and sat behind me in science class and always had a stick of gum to share. He was smart and neat, a mix of sweet and serious. I think of him always in his corduroy FFA jacket or at Charlie’s working on our friend’s race car. He was the first boy to ever buy me flowers. I was in seventh grade and I didn’t know how to act when a boy buys you flowers. I know I said thank you, I know I did that much, but then what? Like the old house I’ll never visit again, too quickly he became someone I now only see in dreams. And, again, like the old house, out of all the people I’ve lost, for some reason, he visits most often. And it’s always good to see him, except I wish that it could be that he lived on his farm on the other side of town and he works on tractors with his boys and my husband would text him to come over for New Years Eve and he should bring beer and the kids of course. I like to imagine he would have made his way back home like us, because I think that’s what he would have wanted.

The stock dam outside our house has frozen over smooth this winter, good enough for the girls to shove stocking feet in ice skates and head over the hill to glide around under the watch of the big hill we call Pots and Pans and the tall oak and ash. I stand on the side and watch them spin and fall and laugh and bruise their knees under fluffy snowpants. I wonder if I should buy my own ice skates this winter, it’s been years since I’ve been on them, but man, it used to be so fun. My little sister and I would walk down to the creek and shovel the snow off, then sit on the bank and lace up our skates. I remember one winter the snow didn’t need to be cleared and we could skate all the way up that little creek, like a magical icy trail among the trees. I watch my girls working on spins with their arms out and know there are versions of myself that I can never be again, not even if I put on the skates.

On New Years Eve I will ask my husband to build a fire on the side of that dam and we will invite our neighbors and family to come and skate. We’ll do this to create a memory for those kids and to recreate the good ones we have tied to this season. Because, yes, there are places we can only go in our dreams, and people we will only find there now. But while we’re here, while we’re here, maybe we should, maybe we could, make something for us to dream about…