Cranberries Song

I had a dream about my grandma.  

We know that dreams are just the brain working its own shit out in weird, surreal, misfiring ways.  Like the brain is throwing anything from paint to mustard at a canvas and then pinching its chin like, Is this art?  If that's not an accurate summary of dreams, it's because I haven't researched it since 2009 and/or I never fucking knew in the first place, but that's what I think.  I've often had "problem" dreams about things I'm dealing with at the time.  Sometimes they're resolved tidily and I wake up disappointed that the tidy resolution wasn't real, and other times, situations go entirely out of control and I wake relieved by reality.  Usually, though, my dreams feel relevant to nothing, just a series of images foreign and familiar, soon forgotten.  

But ever since my grandma died in 2003, I've dreamt she's alive.  It used to be all the time, but now it's once or twice a year.  Infrequent but reliable, and never gone even this many years later.  Some losses never dull, never stop being shocking.  She was 82 and I still feel like she was torn away unexpectedly. It happened so fast with her, in exactly the way we all want it to happen after a long life.  

In the dreams, I'll be at her house, in the now-times, and she'll appear in the picture with no fanfare.  I'll puzzle, wondering how the hell she's alive and if she has been this whole time and I just didn't know, and each time she blows me off like, "What, honey?" quizzical look while she does something else.  This isn't interesting, but the last one was.

She was swimming in a pool with some girlfriends, and they were all drinking tequila cocktails.  Laughing and splashing around, with their hair tied up, arcing their heads like cantering ponies, trying to keep their hair out of the water.  She got out of the pool, and I went to her and hugged her.  She was younger than I ever knew her in life, looked like late 50s, the age she was when I was born.  When I wrapped my arms around her, she felt firm and strong and her body was deeply warm the way people feel when they've been lying in the sun all day.  It was such a full body physical experience, to feel the warmth of her back and sides through my arms, and to hug her, both of us adult women, like friends.  Something I never experienced with her.  She was happy and social and busy.  She always was.  Such an outgoing woman, so different from me. 

I joked with her that I heard she'd been drinking and she laughed a little, looked off over the crowd, listening to something someone else was saying.  The house was full of people.  "I always liked a crowd," she used to say in life, child #9 out of 11.  I walked back to her kitchen sink where my mom was talking to my dead uncle and his wife and we resumed chatting about nothing.

Other peoples' dreams aren't interesting, so yanno, suck it up.