Logic Doesn’t Get a Vote

The goji berry at the east fence had gotten completely away from me again, forty feet of it in one area spreading exponentially like it had somewhere better to be, and in the dream I was finally doing what I have promised myself for at least two years that I would do: cut it clean back to nothing and start over. Five years of neglect, maybe longer if I am honest, somewhere back around the time the whole world stopped keeping its rhythm. I had been telling myself that clearing it might shame me into finally tackling the fence on the other side too, the one that keeps me from having to look at the junk pile of a property next door every single time I walk that line, a property I still kick myself over not buying when it was mine for the asking and cheap.

That is when I heard the kids.

A whole cluster of them, voices high and overlapping, pressed up against my west fence in James and Shirley’s yard. James and his wife are the kind of neighbors a person does not get twice in a life. They have always loved our flock, who spend half their days over there anyway, and Shirley sets a lawn chair in the yard where she calls the chickens by name and feeds them mealworms while they cluck along with her like she is leading a choir. It is a small, guilty pleasure of mine, listening and watching that from a distance while I work in the yard and garden. This time the kids spotted me over the grapes filling that side of the fence, and a handful of them were my own students, which makes no sense at all since none of them live anywhere near this part of town. It’s a dream. Logic does not get a vote. TO! TO! He’s here! Heeey TO!

That sound. That is the thing I knew I would miss and somehow did not know how much until it started disappearing from my actual days. Not the bell, not the schedule, not even the classroom itself. That specific note in a kid’s voice when they are simply, unguardedly, glad to see you, before anyone has taught them to perform anything else. It used to be everywhere, all day, every day. I am only now learning how rare that is once it is gone. It is summer, sure, but knowing I will not be going back makes the missing a little more top of mind.

By the time I finally answered the call and got up, the dream had already started sliding sideways the way dreams do when you are not paying close enough attention. East fence dissolved into the woodshop. I was sanding down a repaired hole in a cradled panel, a clean round “mistake” some kid had put there with a hole saw, and there he was grinning at me, maybe a seventh grader, sawdust still caught in his hair where he had missed it brushing himself off. The kind of kid who knows exactly what he did and is not sorry about it. I appreciate everything about kids like that. That was me, fifty-five or so years ago when I was a seventh grader.
Then the dream resolved again, and I was back in the shop, holding the drill with the hole saw still chucked into it, the kids’ voices drifting in from somewhere outside, bobbing and overlapping in that same scattered rhythm my flock uses when they are arguing over who gets the next mealworm.

My dream of the boy who cut a hole in the cradled panel 
Crafted using a custom Midjourney moodboard I built and trained on my own art and photos.

I do not usually fight this hard to wake up. 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. is my normal window of brain work, and most days I just wake up on my own, no fight involved, usually right around 4:03. It is the best stretch of my day, the one I protect like it owes me money, and most mornings I am up and writing before my brain has time to argue about it. This time I fought it. Turned over. Fell back under. Lost most of the dream to the kind of mist that disappears the second you try to look straight at it, and only got the fragment back a few minutes later when I finally surfaced for good.
Then I remembered the two nights before it. Asleep too late both times, wide awake at one thirty, lying there until I finally gave up and got up to work the edges off rather than stare at the ceiling. I almost never remember a dream, because most nights I sleep like the dead. Those two rough nights had already broken that pattern, and that is probably the only reason this one had any clarity to it at all. The broken sleep kept me closer to the surface than usual, just long enough to actually catch the dream before it slipped back under.

Worth the fight. Even at 4:08.

Some weeks the only thing waiting on the other side of two bad nights is a dream sharp enough to write about. I will take that trade most mornings, even the rough ones.

Keep making, keep growing, be you.

Tio

My dream of the kids on the fence
Crafted using a custom Midjourney moodboard I built and trained on my own art and photos.