Dreaming...

 When I go to sleep at night my brain, my subconscious, or my other other self, whatever you want to call it or whatever it is goes to places I used to be 40 or 50 years ago. Maybe it's because I am old but a couple of nights ago I dreamed I was walking down old Press Road in Southern Nacogdoches County, Tx. 

They may have some blacktop on the road these days but in my dream it was a dusty, red dirt trail through pine woods and dotted with old country houses. I was walking in the hot summer time and I soon arrived at the old rent house where several friends lived and trudged up the driveway. As I arrived it suddenly became apparent to me that I was naked. 

My friends sat in old wooden chairs in the yard (this was the days before we all had bag chairs from big box stores) and I don't really recall particular people that were there. The people in my dream were just composites, familiar to me so much that I was comfortable to to be naked to them. 

There was one feature of the yard that was not there in reality but in my dream I saw a faint woods trail, wide enough for cars leading from the pine and oak forest behind the house around the edge of the property and joining the driveway at the main road. As my naked self approached the people in the yard a car and some foot traffic appeared on this dim, little used path. 

The car was old ragged and rusted. The people and it seemed to be all women in the car and on foot were also ragged and a bit rusted like people in old depression era dustbowl photos. I was ashamed of my nakedness and I lay down in the dry leaves accumulated under a strip of trees between the road people and the people in the yard. I lay facedown and tried to cover my shinny hinny with the leaves. It was taking a pretty big pile of leaves. 

Eventually traffic on the road subsided and someone directed me to an outdoor shower set up at the edge of the road. Somehow I had a green fishing shirt that I wear to the lake and camping and I wrapped it around my waist as I walked to the shower. This is the most recent photo I could find of the green shirt. Apparently I wear it playing guitar also. 

I was ready for a shower because I was dirty from laying in the leaves and summer time in the hinterlands of Nacogdoches County is a great place to discover yourself covered in ticks. Right at that moment another woman came down the road. She was younger, fair skinned and wearing a long ragged dress. She pointed out a plant growing around the shower area. It was like a green onion but with a large bulb at the end and two foot long green shoots for leaves. The woman said, "when we shower, we scrub with these."

For some reason this tip flared my temper with impatience. I told her, "I know that!" 

I woke up from the dream and sat on the side of the bed. It was about four in the morning and I needed to urinate. My stomach told me I should have just had two pieces of left over pizza instead of four. After I took care of my businesses I sat on the bed and thought about the dream. This is not unusual, to wake and have my mind get busy in the middle of the night over what it's been doing when I have not been actively driving it. 

As I write this it occurs to me that there are several people that lived in the old house on Press Road might read about this dream and I wonder if they have dreams also.