Dreams and Dreams Fulfilled
My relationship began to crumble with my husband, too. I felt betrayed by him and felt he was more sensitive to his hysterical mother than to me. I began to have recurring dreams of being married to a tall, slender, dark-haired man. I would see my home being sold and traveling on the road in halves (it was a modular house, so this was possible). Still, it made no sense to me, but I recognized that the house was traveling toward a town just 12 miles north of where I lived in Ohio. In my mind's eye in my dreams, I would travel down that road to the countryside, to an old farmhouse that was so run down it scared me to be there.
Over and over, I would have this strange dream, and each time in the dream I would walk closer and closer to the farmhouse until one day I walked up onto the back porch, opened the screen door and went in. Then the door would suddenly fly shut behind me, the the old wooden farmhouse door would latch shut and I could not get out. A little room partitioned off by curtains was right beside the back door, and the curtains were blowing open revealing lighted candles on shelves and a book with pages blowing open. Then the pages seemed to be ripping out and blowing all around the room. I would pull franticly at the door and would finally get it open. I ran down the long lane away from the house, being chased by barking dogs. Thankfully, I would wake up but in a cold sweat.
I had this dream often, but would always be relieved to wake up and find out I was not divorced and was in my own bed in my own home.
Finally, in 1989, my husband and I did divorce. Two years later, in the middle of the night, I got a call from my ex-husband that my ex-mother-in-law wanted me to come to the hospital to see her. I found out she had a brain tumor in almost the exact spot where Jennifer's was. She passed away 10 years after my daughter's death, exactly as Jennifer said, when she would come to take her home with her.
My home and my life in the 1980s was a very low point in my life. I also had lost a sister to cancer two years after my daughter passed away. I took a job and moved from the small town where my husband and I went to school together. The town was suffocating me and I had to get away from all the bad memories there and my daughter's grave, which I obsessed over and went to daily.
The job I accepted was in a town 12 miles north. It was a grocery store and was on the same road I traveled in my dreams. The road ran past the very place where I met my second husband - a tall, slender man with dark hair.
We moved just northeast of my home town to an old farmhouse that was his mother's family homestead. Her father had built this house in the 1920s when he moved here from Italy. Our old home required a lot of fixing up. I hated it because it was so much like the farmhouse in my dreams, complete with an old door that would slam shut behind me. I do not feel the presence of ghosts in this house, nor have I ever even missed one night's sleep, even though many of my husband's mother's family have passed away here and the funerals took place in the dining room.
This is the first time I have put this all down in writing, but after reading it, some things seems to have unfolded in my life like it was all in a story book... and was already written for me.
