The dream: A message of hope

I have been having a series of dreams lately, dreams that have taken me back through the foggy mists of time and memory. I have tried to sort out all the images and scenes into some kind of order. This column is the result. The reasons why will become clear in the end.

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There is a house on the hill at the end of a narrow road lined with tall cedar and pine on the northern boundary of Kirkland and southern Juanita, two small towns just east of Seattle and across Lake Washington. It is all built up now. I find myself standing there on the corner looking down the steep hill on my left and the huge number of houses flowing down to the bottom. To my right is another street full of houses. It wasn’t always so.

A fog rolls in. Not an ordinary fog of cold wet mist, this is a fog of time and memory. A warmth seeps from it as it flows in and fills the scene before me. It’s so thick I can’t see my hands. A breeze settles in. It gently blows some of the thick stuff away. The houses to my right are gone, only the flattened ground devoid of them remains. A new road cuts through to connect two neighborhoods together.

The scene fades from view as another thick gout of fog rolls in. I could sense time was going backwards again. Ghostly images of trees began to form and take shape. Then the sun began to burn through as they became solid, and the light touched upon them as the fog finally cleared away.

Where a neighborhood once filled the area only a huge horse chestnut tree stood. Its branches hung close to the old road I stood on. It stood guard over the entrance to Meyer’s field. A house once was there decades before. Now only the land remained, ringed by a small forest that flowed up the hill, lined with brambles on one side, scotch broom on the other and capped off by a small field in between.

Four houses remained on my left on top of the hill. The road down that steep San Francisco-style grade remained fairly untouched. Houses lined either side of the street as it wound down to the bottom, just not as many back then as there are today. That street divided the first two properties from each other. The pavement stopped just a little past them. A dirt driveway began just after. The third house, a dark brown split-level, stood just past the dirt and pavement boundary. I smiled warmly. That was my home way back than as it was nearly 40 years ago. Right next to my home stood a house far older than the rest. That one was built around 1900.

Sitting on the corner behind a row of mailboxes under a cedar-shingled roof lay the first house. Nestled under a small grove of cedar trees was the home of my best friend in the world, Matt Skenandore, and his clan of 11 brothers and sisters. As I stood there, shadows flitted past. Flickers of sound and blurred images flew by ‘— indistinct, out-of-phase flitters of motion spinning me about at first. I caught snippets of laughter, an occasional word or two, blurred images of children riding bikes or hanging out in front of the old chestnut tree, running down the trails and walking down the hill. Most likely Matt’s brothers and sisters as well as our other neighbors. Once or twice I swear I saw a young version of myself riding a skateboard, only to fade out into a mist.

Time was doing weird things here. It was not flowing forward or backward. Nothing appeared to be totally solid, and yet some was.

I was inside the blur of a memory, the clouded mists of time long past. I stepped off the curb toward my old home. As I got closer, it came into sharper focus, with its cedar shake roof, brown trim and large picture windows, the orange Datsun station wagon in front of the garage and my cousin’s old ‘57 blue pickup truck next to it.

My feet touched the dirt driveway with a slight crunch that sounded loud. Just then, a voice rang out.

“Dan’l me boy!”

Looking up and to the right was a sight for sore eyes, the madrona tree at the edge of the woods across from my home — an 80-foot twin-trunked tree with a canopy of leaves topping it like a very large stalk of broccoli. Nestled in between about halfway up the trunks was the tree fort.

Matt was waving out the front window. Well, not really a window. It was just a view port, one of three from that tiny box stuffed into that old tree 40 feet straight up. It was built from scraps of lumber, some old and some new — “acquired” from local building sites.

I yelled back, “Mathew, me’ lad!” in my best faux Irish, which honestly wasn’t too good. Heck we were both far from being Irish. I ran to the trail entrance with little problem, scooting past the brambles of wild raspberry bushes that formed a buffer between the tree and my old driveway. Right the base of the tree I stopped and looked up.

Matt’s head poked out. He looked like I did: a middle-aged man with short hair with a little grey creeping in on the sides, a rugged, clean-shaven face and a deep voice that rang out.

“Come on up, Dan. You won’t believe this!”

I looked down at the trunk. His crutches leaned against it, a sign from the old days he was up there. That was no bother to me — the crutches, that is. Strangers saw them first. I never did, they were part of Matt and that was good enough for me. After all, he built the tree fort with a little of my help and quite a few of the kids in the neighborhood. He was the first to climb it to the top as well. Not bad for someone who couldn’t stand on his legs without their aid.

With a grunt I jumped up and grabbed the first branch. Before I knew it was halfway up like a monkey. Stunned, I stopped my assent. Looking down at the trunk, a long black skateboard rested next to Matt’s crutches. It was mine. I felt odd, too. I looked along at my hands and feet. Gone was the old leather flight jacket. Gone were my blue jeans and desert combat boots. Even my army hat was nowhere to be found on my head.

I felt hair. Long locks of dark hair flowed down to my shoulders in waves and loose curls with no trace of grey. My face was bare of the old grey goatee; nothing but smooth skin. Wide-legged jeans end in a bell hiding my sneakers. A flannel shirt damp with sweat from riding that board for miles peeked out from under a beat-up old jacket. Its sleeves of fake leather at one time were silver, now they are smudged with years of dirt and held together with safety pins in strategic places. The elastic cuffs on both sleeves and the bottom are tattered and torn. Its fake blue wool chest and back panels are stained and faded. My Mom called it “old mold.” She hated it, but I loved it. My hands were now sporting my old skating gloves of battered tan leather to complete the transformation.

I was 16 again. I whooped for the shear joy of it. I scampered up, hitting every worn handhold and footpad with a practiced ease I thought was long forgotten. Just at the entrance I paused and then crawled through the narrow opening.

This is the first of a two-part Front & Center. Look for part two in Friday’s Frontiersman.

Wasilla resident Daniel D. Grota retired from the U.S. Army after more than 21 years of service.