Rescuing My Ghost Girl

The dreams returned every few months, several times a year. Without fail. For twenty-one years.

I dreamed of the different bedrooms I called my own so long ago: the blue room, the green room, and the brown room. The green was my favorite.

Of the living room’s red velvet wing-back chairs I used to curl up in, reading.

Of the kitchen counter, where I ate breakfast each morning, looking out the window through the pine trees at people passing on foot or bicycle, often on their way to the beach.

Of the family room downstairs where I spent hours watching VHS recordings of American TV shows because they were in English and therefore a link to home.

In that basement room, I cried hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner” during a broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

From ages ten to thirteen, this was the house I lived in, far from my childhood home in the Rockies. This new house was across the ocean, on another continent, in Helsinki.

The recurring dreams started shortly after we returned to the States. In some of them, I visited the house. In others, I still lived there. Often the house appeared different, and I discovered passageways or rooms I hadn’t known existed. Often the floor plan had changed. Or the whole place had been remodeled.

However they showed up, the dreams always had the same two constants: first, I knew I belonged there, and second, I knew I needed to return.

The house dreams began in junior high and continued through high school and college. But they didn’t stop there. Years after getting married, even after giving birth four times, I still had house dreams.

While raising a family, moving, and entering new stages of life, the one thing I could count on to never change was having another disconcerting house dream every few months. Not constantly, but anywhere from two to four a year.

Related posts:

To be here now. Too fast this Sunrise gone a pink so deep so dark so hot lava pink lemonade sky back to the blue hue. If it were red every morning it’s like those old, that old saying about the…

The sea dons a mask — its undulating reflections of clouds spreading into sky like butter into toast, reminding me of peeks into great-grandmother’s mirror, its funhouse distortions. What’s missing…