dreams gone by.

I stand (or rather, this morning, sit) at the threshold of a new year; my last year.  There is a certain sweetness to the knowledge that what I do, I do now for the last time.  The last orientation at Storch, the last round of meeting new people, the last year of living in Wittlingen, the last rainy, fly-infested August in Germany.  There is a sadness to it as well, and an anticipation.  And, as often happens at the start of something new, I find myself reflecting on the past more earnestly.

I don’t think that I was able to properly process my last year at the dorm while home in the States.  The environment was too different, the surroundings unfamiliar and unable to prompt my mind to visit the events of the year prior, which took place so far away.  As I was reading yesterday in Beuchner’s Lion Country, there is a phenomenon in which the moving from one location to another, so distant and so unconnected from one another, feels like moving from a dream back to real life.  Sometimes, the dream is preferable, in its safety (for you know that, no matter what happens there, it does not truly alter your reality), but most times, it is the reality, however painful and sometimes ugly, that is far more desirable.  After all, though dreams may hold things that reality never can, the fact is that you cannot experience them in all their fullness unless they are real. 

Returning here to Germany, I have the sense that my past 7 weeks in America were more dreamlike than real.  It’s not that the people of my dreams were not real, or that the time I spent with them was not valuable, but the pattern of life that I lived among them for those weeks was not accurate.  As often happens in dreams, a large cast assembled including characters from different acts and different plays that were not meant to exist on the stage at the same time.  The order in which the characters appeared was haphazard and unsystematic.  They came and went, via phone calls and e-mails, plane trips and coffee dates, in a confusing and complicated dance number that I had not fully rehearsed.  Their faces and their words still dance through my mind as I sit here this morning, swatting flies and listening to the German voices outside the kitchen window.  But they are far away, and I have only my memories of their conversation to replay and reflect on.  But enough of this.  The dream-like quality of the summer is fading away as I settle back into what is my current reality here in Germany:

screaming teenagers, watermelon, 

mosquito attacks, answering questions, headaches, 

college applications (for my kids, that is), grocery lists, german cuisine, and the "texas embassy"...  (don't ask.  or do, but ask me later.)