forest dreams (google earth part II)

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream
~Poe The first thing I remember is a dream. I'm three or four-years-old and I have this reoccurring dream where my best friend and I have found a secret key in my grandmother’s closet leading to an invisible door behind her nightstand. We get the key, climb behind the nightstand and a tiny door appears so small we have to crawl through it. I turn the key and crouch to duck my head under the frame, Hallie follows me. It opens to a diving board above my back yard so when we walk to the end we are over the middle of the yard. When we jump we are in the woods behind my house. Not a forest, just woods. The trees are thin enough to walk between without a trail and you can see the houses on my street and the next one over the whole way. We walk four or five houses up, still in the woods, and come to a swimming pool in small park. Swings, slide, merry-go-round and these horse swings, the whole place feels like magic. Enchanted. The first time we visit the playground it’s summer, the next time it’s fall, then winter, then spring. Maybe I dreamed it over and over, one journey after another, in the same night. Maybe it was every night for a week? I don’t know.

All I know is how real it felt. I stand at the foot of my sister's twin bed in the gray pre-dawn grabbing strands of orange and yellow shag carpet with my toes. I’m talking fast, excited, and she’s still sleepy eyes. If I’m four, she’s 14.

“It was a dream,” she tells me. “You went there in your sleep. There is no playground in the woods. There is no swimming pool in the woods. It didn't really happen”

There is no convincing me. I was there and I know what I know. I look to my other sister in the top bunk for back-up, but she never has my back. She's 12 and I drive her crazy, in return she terrorizes me. Leans down over the side of the top bunk in the dark and cackles like the Wicked Witch of the West.

"It's just a dream," she says. "Go back to bed."

My Grandma and uncle, my mom's younger brother, live with us in the house on Longhill Dr. They each have a room. My brother has a room. My parents have a room. My sisters and I share the biggest bedroom, which feels like living in a red and yellow shag carpeted stable with John Denver. My Mickey Mouse poster gets one tiny corner of real estate on the wall, the horses and John Denver's goofy grin dominate the rest. At two I can sing Point me in the direction of Albuquerque and everyone thinks it's hilarious that a two-year-old can say Albuquerque. At five I can do most of The Beatles catalog.

"It did happen. It is there. Hallie can tell you, I know she'll remember going."

I'm dressed and in the woods with Hallie by the time the sun is up. I'm asking her how far she thinks it is. She, of course, has no idea what I'm talking about but she goes along with me.

For years after I concede that it was just a dream I tramp through the woods looking for that park. We laugh at the dinner table about that dream I thought was real, how silly, and into college, on weekend visits I still occasionally rummage through my Grandma Rose's closet sure I will eventually find the key. It never surfaces. I never fully subscribe to the dream theory because its as vivid as anything in my memory. The view across the yards from the diving board. The snow frosting the playground and pool.

So, I'm using Google Earth the other night to float over my childhood and there in the woods, exactly where it should be, should always have been, right in the place I could never find it: a bright blue spot that could only be a swimming pool.