Broken Shoes and Stolen Cars

Before summer kicks in, I hold a contest with myself to see how long I can go without running the air conditioner. I do this for two reasons. First, I fancy it brings out my resourceful side. Second, I am cheap. This evening for example, now that the sun has gone down and the outside air has cooled, I have the side door open, so heat from the stove and the oven can dissipate before bedtime.

This won't last. By July, the air's thickness will blanket the ground, making cooling impossible. The temperatures at night will be just as oppressive as the temperatures during the day. Moving around in it will be like wading through warm, damp cotton.

I digress. Back to my contest. It's May, and the air conditioning is still off. At night I open a few windows in the back of the house to let breezes in and I crank on the floor fan and set it near the foot of the bed. I do not sleep under the covers, but have a sheet at the foot of the bed in case I get cold before morning. In May, you can still get cold before morning. Then I sleep in as little clothing as possible.

This is a pretty good system except for one factor. Mollie is one of my dogs. I have two small dogs, one male and one female. While Petey supports my contest objectives, Mollie does not. He wisely finds a cool spot away from his heat-generating owner and sleeps alone. For Mollie, this just won't do. She insists not only in sleeping with me, but sleeping next to me - stretched out between my calves, pressed against the small of my back or possibly draped across my neck, whichever position seems to give her the most skin-to-skin contact that night. And Mollie gives off heat. Lots of heat. Like a hot bullet. I’m actually not certain that a bullet is hot, but after being blasted out of a narrow cylinder at a high rate of speed, propelled by a spark, I think it’s a solid bet.

In an already lukewarm house, this overheats me. And when I sleep while overheated, I have really odd and vivid dreams. Like the one I had Friday night. I dreamed I was dating the guy from that home improvement show where a crew of hundreds shows up to build a deserving family a house in one week. Anyway, for some reason I wanted to impress upon him that I was not high maintenance, so on our date I wore flip-flops. And as luck would have it, I did not impress him at all, because the strap on my flip-flop broke while we were crossing the street to visit our favorite coffee house. So instead of enjoying a nice evening next to the fire (this must have been my brain telling me how hot Mollie was) he drove me to a local home improvement store, because this apparently is the only kind of store he would know about. There, he wanted me to find replacement flip-flops.

The rest of the dream was a frantic search for new flip-flops. Strangely, this home improvement store DID have shoes. But none of them worked for one reason or another. None of them seemed to satisfy me, and though I can’t remember now why they didn’t suit me, I was left hunting for quite some time through a shelf of unsuitable shoes. And the strap on the shoe I was wearing was still broken, so I had to slide my foot across the store floor. He was clearly embarrassed because he LEFT me, his LOVELY date to look at saws. Before I woke up, I had purchased duct tape to reattach the entire shoe to my foot so he could take me home.

Saturday night, I dreamed that I opened my side door to discover that my car had been stolen. The rest of that dream consisted of me searching all my belongings outside to see if anything had been stolen from the laundry room or the shed.

Because I am an only child and a little self-absorbed, I have started to wonder why all my vivid dreams lately are about searching for something. I wonder what I’m most worried about, being lost myself, or losing something important to me.

I wonder when the dreams will stop.