Excerpt: Dreams of Nature

Dreams are funny things. They have no weight to them, no mass. They don’t exist as an actual item. You can’t go to the corner grocery store and say, “I’d like a half pound of roasted turkey breast, sliced sandwich style, a quarter pound of aged Swiss cheese, a small jar of anchovy stuffed green olives and one dream, please.” The deli counter staff would stare at you with their mouths hanging open.
But dreams do exist. In fact there are two types of dreams. The most common dream occurs as people sleep. The scientists call it Rapid Eye Movement or REM sleep. It allows the sleeper to process the days events and their subconscious runs the nightly entertainment. Sometimes they are remembered, sometimes they are not. It does not matter. They are a natural part of life and it has been proven that the human body actually needs a certain amount of dream sleep. Without it they cannot get rested and deprived of dreams long enough, the person will have hallucinations and develop psychoses.
The other type of dream has more power. It is the dreams that occur in the day time when the heart becomes aware that there is something that it wants, and it wants it bad. It is a longing from inside a person, logic plays not part in the dream, the desire, the passion. They are potential energy, stored in the minds and hearts of human beings. (Or perhaps other creatures have dreams too. Maybe dolphins long to fly in the sky.) Dreams are ephemeral, but all that potential energy can be turned into the power that changes lives.
Most dreams fade. The flames of passion die and only the ashes of regret are left. But sometimes, the embers stay alive for years, waiting for the opportunity to flare back into flame. All they need is the right fuel and the dream returns brighter and hotter than ever, sweeping the dreamer along helplessly to realization … or failure.
****
George Longfellow was a successful man on the surface. He was forty-five years old and didn’t even look forty. He kept fit by frequent trips to the gym and by jogging on his lunch hour three times a week. He was a vice president for the First Eastern Trust Bank earning close to two hundred thousand dollars a year, before factoring in stock options and bonuses. He had a wonderful wife, to whom he was faithful and devoted, and four intelligent children. They had a spacious six bedroom, four bathroom faux Victorian home on a quarter acre lot with a three car garage situated in Glen Cove, long Island. The four children were all in private schools, as befitted the offspring of a successful banker from Glen Cove.
Since he didn’t like the ocean over much, they were not members of the yacht club or the country club. What George liked was caring for his lawn and maintaining his garden in the back yard. It was a point of contention between him and the rest of his family that they could not have a nice in-ground pool like all of their surrounding neighbors. George would argue that he didn’t want to be like all of the neighbors. A strange concept to be sure. The local homeowner’s association was disappointed that they were not able to pass provisions to compel George to remove his gardens. The rebellious home owners in the subdivision argued that since the gardening was done in the back yard and no one could see, why not let George be a little different. It wasn’t like it affected home values as long as it was not visible.
Herb Calafoni and his wife Letitia who were the president and treasurer of the Elysian Manors Home Owners Association in Glen Cove didn’t happen to agree. They lobbied and pestered until there were additional rules about hiring landscapers for any home garden care and that any personalized greenery were allowed only if they were a sanctioned species of bush or plant. Trees were expressly not allowed in the back yards. They might disrupt the in-round pools and drop leaves that would clog filters.
Herb liked to consider himself the leader of their little community. If everyone would accept his guidance, they could sail the turbulent waters of organic fertilizer use and solar and wind energy supporter encroachment. He got to meet all the new neighbors and he liked to know that all of the young women knew his name. He loved to watch Desperate Housewives and wished more women like them would move to Elysian Manors.
Letitia had no belief in Herb’s ability to tell a bird to fly. She was involved in the EMHOA to keep an eye on Herb so he wouldn’t embarrass her. Herb was 53 years old and stood 5 and half feet tall and had more hair growing out of his ears than on top of his head. She wished some other woman would catch his eye sometimes so that he would be able to leave her alone in the bedroom. Honestly twice a year was more than enough in her book. If he wanted a mistress, great. As long as no one knew about it, he would have no arguments from her. (Which Herb would consider strange because Letitia gave him an argument about most things that he did without her prior approval.)
Plus, Letitia liked handling large amounts of money. It was a responsibility and a rush combined into one. Each of the sixty-eight home owners had to pay quarterly maintenance fees that went toward upkeep of the common grounds and the salaries of the small group of security guards who operated the gate to their exclusive little community. She wrote the newsletter about their progress in stamping out the movement for sidewalks in the neighborhood and organized the semiannual community barbeque and bonfire in May and October. Everyone always thought she did such a good job that no one ever asked for receipts. No one missed the little bits that Letitia skimmed into her pockets. She had been a bookkeeper at an accountant firm that had been audited by the Internal Revenue Service after she had left, before she had gotten married and she was real good at making the numbers look like they came out right. The accountant firm had been fined $25,000 for malfeasance and one of the owners had been sent to prison for embezzlement. Letitia was quite shocked to learn what nice little Mr. McGill had been up to. She shook her head and thought, “You think you know people…” and thought that it neatened things up well. She was good at being neat.
George met his wife Evelyn when they were both in college. She was a cute sorority girl who took an interest in him and agreed to a date. She was smart and funny and didn’t think he was a total nerd. She was the girl of his dreams and he fell fast and hard for her.
On the flip side, George was the answer to college aged Evelyn’s dreams too. She had always dreamed of being fabulously wealthy and being able to live the jet-setting lifestyle she could only read about in magazines. Fame was not a requirement to Evelyn’s dreams, but she wanted to travel and live in a lovely house and have enough money to do what she wanted. She agreed to go out with George when they met at a frat party. She was being harassed by a drunk football player twice his size and he came to her rescue. He got his nose broken for his trouble and she realized that he was brave and sweet. When she learned that he was majoring in accounting and finance and had a summer internship at a bank already lined up, she decided that he was the one for her. The fact that he was a direct descendent of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was just icing on the cake. Evelyn thought that it was romantic that her husband had such a famous ancestor. Her children would share in the fame as well and that would reflect well on her.
Since their children were all in school, (private school of course. It would ruin the upper middle-class image to have them attend public school.) she had returned to work. She had a job as a computer programmer for a payroll firm that handled the accounts of three thousand companies in the United States. It was a job that paid for the maid to come in once a week as well. Housework does not fit the jet-set image either and the pair of them were a bit on the slobby side. As long as she made enough to pay for after school day care, there were no arguments about her staying home and being the ‘Banker’s wife’.
On the surface to the people who knew them, both George and Evelyn had idyllic lives. The average person would not think that either one of them would long for anything more in their lives.
But they were wrong.
George was a lord of numbers. He could move money and work with people just fine from his post behind his mahogany executive desk. But he often found himself elsewhere in his thoughts.
When he was a boy, his parents were going through a divorce so they sent him to his childless Aunt Estelle and Uncle Frank Merriweather’s farm in Upstate New York. Even though his life was in turmoil, and was going through a permanent change with regards to his home and parents, that summer he spent baling hay, weeding gardens and taking care of his uncle’s livestock was one of the happiest of his life. He loved the burning feel of the sunshine on his face when he forgot to wear the hat his mother had sent with him. Being ten years old, he didn’t care about the sunburned nose he had and of course he thought it was totally cool when the skin started to peel. He imagined that he was a snake, like the little garter snakes that lived in the stone work around the hand-pump well on the farm’s side lawn.
Sometimes it was the smell of the toner that reminded him of the odor of new mown hay. Other times it was the gardenia perfume that Marjorie Burnside liked to drench herself with so that she thought that she was fooling everyone about the alcohol fumes on her breath. Whenever that happened, he’d be ten years old again and wondering if swimming in the creek behind the house or playing with the newborn calves would be the best use of his afternoon.