This morning’s dream heartened me:

It is a spring morning and breezes quiver greening leaves upon towering oaks. I’ve met my first cousins at the old Moloney three-story brownstone, located on a corner lot in the city. Decades of neglect have given it a derelict appearance: overgrown shrubs, waist-high grasses, cracked sidewalks, sagging gutters, trash matted against the side gate. At the bottom of the hilly front yard sits Lucy Kelly pulling weeds. I call down to her. “You are a beautiful child. Never forget that.” Her dark eyes study me with bewilderment. I plan to buy large planters, fill them with colorful annuals, and line them next to the wide granite front steps.

The image of the old Moloney three-story brownstone suggests my psychic container, still bearing the imprint of my alcoholism, despite years in AA recovery and recent ones in CPA. The tendrils of my psychic disease still hide out in the nook and crannies of my shadow. I’m powerless to extricate them.

But change, not of my making, is in the offing. New willingness appears in the first cousins to repair the broken, to replace overgrown shrubs and seed the weed-infested yard, and whatever else is needed, given my terminal illness and shortness of days. The forlorn Lucy Kelly, an image of my damaged child, reminds me to deepen my self-care, to gentle my angst in letting down this life for another.

Yet, my desire to beautify the wide granite front steps speaks of my continuing interest to cull dreams from oblivion’s cobwebs and blog their messages.

I’ve much to learn from the Beautifier…