We Went Searching

In a dream, I looked all around me for something I'd lost. I climbed over a mountain and ran across a meadow (you can do all that in your sleep).

Thing is, I didn't know what I'd lost. But I was frantic for it, whatever it was. Finally, I found my husband, who was in a cornfield chastising a calf for running through the electric fence (they've been doing that for real recently so I know where *that* came from).

"I've lost it!" I cried, throwing myself into his chest. His arms folded around me.

"We'll find it," he said.

So we started looking. He didn't ask me what I'd lost, and I never told him, but we went searching for it.

I looked under couches and in drawers. We were in our house now. He went into the garage.

The scenery changed and I was in a desert, very hot. My mouth was dry. I was still searching, though. Sand fell between my fingers as I pawed at the landscape. 

I wondered why my husband wouldn't come in from the garage and bring me a glass of water.

Dreams are so very odd sometimes.

I woke with the alarm, so I don't know what I was looking for, or if I ever found it.

The sense of loss has stayed with me all day. What did I lose? What have I lost?

What am I missing?

Who have I forgotten?

We live in perilous times, but we have always lived in perilous times. There are things going on now that I find awful - I think it there is something seriously wrong with a country that has so many poor people who can't feed their children that the schools have to turn buses into food trucks and send them to ensure children are eating.

But we have always had poor people, and children who needed to be fed. (That is no excuse, we should be better than this.)

I have read many, many issues of old newspapers, local and national. I like to read those old issues. Because you know what? The discussions are generally the same.

How do we pay for this or that? Is this the role of government or the private sector? How much is too much and when is it not enough?

I don't even need to look up anything to know we've been through epidemics before. Not just the Spanish flu in 1918, but also polio, tuberculosis, whooping cough, measles, etc.

What am I looking for? I think in my dream I was looking for comfort, for solace, for some kind of control over something over which I have no control - as we all are, when we buy toilet paper or comfort foods or whatever we do to feel like we have some grasp on a situation.

We searched for an intangible, my husband and me, as we waded through my nightmare.

I would like to see leadership during a pandemic but all I see is someone parading the leaders of big companies out in press conferences, shaking hands when they should all be standing 6 feet apart. Certainly no leading by example there.

What else am I looking for? Maybe self-direction. Maybe assurances. Maybe nothing. Maybe I have nothing to look for, I just think I do, because we live in such a lackluster world with lackluster lives.

We went searching, my husband and I, in a dream. He went into the garage. I ended up panting in a desert.

At least in my mind, I sent him some place safe.