5/365: A Dream of My Grandmother's Hands

Snow//end of holidays//rain.

I dream of my grandmother’s hands. Some time in the night, I wake, and it seems vital to remember this dream. I do not recall what it is that makes me pay attention to her hands in the dream, other than she is passing me a box of rings that have become awkwardly tangled and now need undone. One of these rings looks like her engagement ring or enough like it for her to be convinced it is hers, only, even in the dream I know it’s not. I loved my grandmother’s hands, perhaps it is that I’ve begun to forget them, or perhaps I just needed to be reminded of them, but because of this dream, I’ve thought about her long, slender fingers all day, her large rectangular nails, always immaculately kept but never polished. I used to sit and watch at the dinner table as she twisted her engagement ring around her finger. I think she wore the band out at some point and it needed replaced, but that could be me mis-remembering the past, giving flesh and substance to what never was. I dream she lets me wear her pearl necklace, each pearl gifted to her own grandmother by everyone working on the family’s estate. It is a necklace I would like to see one last time. In the dream, it is the wrong one. It is a necklace so rare, I cannot even seem to dream it up now.

It rains all day. I work. I cook. I clean. I read. Useful verbs for a Sunday. Tomorrow the holidays will be over and this time of everything and nothing will suddenly, abruptly become far away. It seems to have snowed everywhere but here. People post photos of deep, frozen snow, roads are closed, tickets are posted last minute on-line in the hope that someone else has better all weather tires. Here, it just rains. I worry I have become so unused to the cold that the next time I visit Scotland, it will feel even less like home; these increments of separation, telling me how long I’ve been here and not there.