The other night, I dreamed of snow.
In my dream, the world was white. I was at my daughters’ preschool, sitting on a sled that was perched precariously atop the roof ridge. This didn’t seem particularly odd, because the roof was covered with snow, and snow was piled halfway up the sides of the building. Down below, the preschool teachers urged me to push off.
It’s not often that I remember my dreams, but this one stuck with me.
The obvious explanation was that, the day before, our family had returned to Vermont after a week spent celebrating my father-in-law’s 70thbirthday on a Caribbean cruise. The cruise originated in Florida, and docked at the islands of St. Maarten, Puerto Rico, and Haiti. In late June, these places are hot, with temperatures in the 90s and humidity you could cut with a butter knife, ocean breezes notwithstanding.
By the end of our vacation week, we longed for Vermont’s climate, which, at the time of our departure, was delivering unusually cool temperatures.
Then we exited the Burlington airport into a long and brutal Vermont heat wave, which, when temperatures topped out at 97°F, exceeded anything we’d experienced in the Caribbean – and without any ocean breezes, at that.
Snow was looking pretty good.
But my dream was also about a fear of falling – about that stomach flipping moment just before you push off and lose control to gravity.
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The Pickle Patch 