Visitors

My mother called last night and said she and my father are coming out next week by train. I need to check on rental cars for when they get here, but it looks like they're going to make it before the snow hits...maybe. The weather around here has been strange all year and it has snowed several times in the past two months. It's like the joy and exuberance of summer never made it off the ground and the warmth and love of vacation days, June weddings, and bees buzzing around a million flowers died before it had a chance to settle into that warm and comfortable feeling that follows unbounded joy. C'est la vie.

At least I can get Dad to help me finish cutting up all the wood and getting it stacked for the winter. I hope they didn't really think they were coming for a vacation. Besides, since Dad has gotten so weird about his chickens lately (he built them a condo in the garage and even painted it for them) I think he needs something to occupy his time and his energies that don't have anything to do with chickens. Of course, we'll drive down to take the Silverton train into New Mexico and back. That should be good and cold on that open train. I need to find my gloves. And we'll stop in Colorado Springs so Mom can indulge her chocolate addiction and maybe so I can say hello to some friends.

Snatches of poetry and stories keep battering at the screens of my mind like moths drawn to the light. So much has been happening I haven't had time to do more than jot down bits and pieces and hope I will remember them later. One image keeps sneaking past thoughts of work and arrangements and research.

She stands at the door kissing him goodbye, her body and soul yearning toward him, unwilling to let him go even though his time in her world is short. He walks away but she cannot follow him. The threshold is the boundary of her world, the point of intersection between her life and his world, the world that claims him. Beyond the threshold she does not exist, neither alive nor dead, a wraith caught between reality and paradise.

It feels like a ghost story. A girl who runs away and disappears and gets caught in limbo, a place between two worlds. When the boy comes to find her she can only reach him thru his dreams and she cannot tell him that only he can make her real or she will be trapped between worlds forever. He rises each morning with her name on his lips and memories of her follow him wherever he goes, bits of emotional flotsam floating on the tides of his mind like a siren's call that pulls at his heart and soul. At first he chalks it up to memories and dreams and then he tracks her to the last place she was seen, the cottage where they met and loved, falls asleep and has the most realistic dream he has ever known. He goes back to his life, but the dreams pull him backward, his love pulls him toward the cottage, the only place where she becomes real and they are together.

But I can't figure out the ending. It seems too easy to choose love and find a way to make the dreams a reality. Any suggestions?