I had a dream a few nights ago, and woke with enough time to scribble down the gist of it before it fled my memory.
It's a small neighborhood in summer, outside of a little yellow house in the yard stands a tattered old blue card table with a big glass jar sitting on it, full of money; coins on the bottom, bills on top. A stuffy man walks over to it and starts to pull money out to count it.
As he does another man, of a Mexican decent perhaps, stumbles up. He has a child wrapped around his shoulders and one clinging to his leg, making him limp all the way over, but he doesn't seem to be bothered by them. They never speak a word, but watch attentively.
"Hey, you can't count that money." He says to the stuffy man.
"Why not? This yard sale is at my parent's house." He replies.
"Because we both know that you're not interested in the yard sale. Besides, I've been coming to see your mother for months; I was there when she died."
"She was just a crazy old loon," the stuffy son retorts, "She didn't make a lick of sense at the end."
The man draped in kids, takes the glass jar and counts the money himself. "She wasn't crazy."
Just then the stuffy son notices a woman, who has just appeared behind the little card table, as if she had been running the yard sale the whole time. The man with kids notices too, and immediately feels he knows her. He begins to recall her description from the old woman who has died. She had spoke of her many times, as if she were in the room, but the man with kids had never seen her. She was young looking, though mature at the same time. Her hair was stuffed up into a flattened blue hat, and she wore a disheveled, matted blue robe, with folds at strange intervals and a large plastic autumn leaf sitting on her right shoulder.
"Who are you?" the stuffy son asks.
"That's God. Well, your mother's "god". Hello, Diana." the man with kids says.
The woman nods at him, but turns her attention to the stuffy son, who immediately begins to criticize her attire. "You're as tattered as this old card table."
"Do not be misled by appearances. This card table has been through more than you would ever believe. Enough things to fill a book with." She says, and pats the old table lovingly.
"Why are you here?" the man with kids asks.
"I've come to give gifts." Diana replies. "To him." She points at the stuffy son.
"To him?" The man with kids asks, "Why him?"
"Why not?" She asks, sticking the man with kids a pointed stare. He doesn't have an answer.
"For you," Diana says. She has the stuffy son's father who has been walking around the yard, not noticing any of them, retrieve the gift from a pile of yard sale items. It's an old yellow plastic bowl, with a little brush in it. "A shaving brush and bowl that will sing when you use it until you are ready to shave. You can have it sing in your head or out loud."
"A brush and bowl?" the stuffy son scoffs, "What kind of gift is that?"
"Do not scoff at humble gifts," she says, "For they can bring people together in a way nothing else can. Your mother treasured an old can of blue paint, so much she wanted it displayed on the front porch. Your father obliged her, and grew fond of it, because she was fond of it. So much so that after she died and it came time to dispose of it, it cost him a few tears."
The father was still musing about the yard, not noticing any of them, but looking very sad as the story was told.
"And your other gift, a mirror." Diana hands the son a simple black framed mirror. "In it it will always be snowing." The son can see the white flakes accumulating on his reflection self as she speaks. "So you can see yourself white, like I do. If you would only accept that."
When the stuffy man and man with kids looked from the gift to Diana again, she was gone, as if she had never been there at all. But the snowing mirror in the son's hands and the singing shaving brush and bowl on the adventure-trodden card table proved she had been.
And then I woke up.
Weird, huh?
