Dream feelings #17

 We are coming up on the 2nd anniversary of Mom's death - tomorrow.  What a terrible time that was in  September of 2023.  My sister and I talk about it every now and then - still processing and debriefing.  And I'm sure that's where this latest dream came from.

I was standing in a shabby house with wooden floors, trying to tie the string on my scrub pants, which were very faded, just like my scrub top.  I really need new scrubs, I thought.  I stepped away from the front door, just in case someone came in while I was tying them.  Immediately, my sister and mother (wearing a nightgown) burst into the house.  My sister said nothing, just stood there with her keys.  Mother rushed from room to room checking it all out, and it was then that I recognized it as her house.  I offered to show her the back yard.  The door to it was through the kitchen which was filthy and had stacks of garbage and recycles sitting by the door.   Mixed in with empty containers of something was also trash.  I said, "I'll take care of those", and cleared it all away to open the door.  Then Mother stepped out from the house and braced herself against the doorway and the side of her house on a small ledge.  I was horrified at how dangerous that seemed.  To the right of the backdoor, in the yard, there was an excavated square of dirt that had tarps laying across it and some broken posts or planks of wood.  She said "oh, I did that".  It was almost like she had to assure herself that this was really her house.  Then the dream ended.

*****

Mother's house was always so dirty, so cluttered, so full of trash or recycles that needed attending to, and dirt everywhere from where she tracked it in after being in the garden.  I used to tell my kids not to take their shoes off at Grandma's.  She lived like she was out in the country, though her house was smack dab in the middle of town.   Even though Brenham had trash and recycle services, Mom regularly left things right where she set them - plastic soil bags and pots, broken furniture, empty Bluebell ice cream containers.

It never didn't stress me out, and I was always trying to help her put order to it, only to discover it was back to being a mess the next time I visited.  It seemed like she should have or would have wanted her home to be clean and tidy, but that was never the actual case.  For someone like me, that made visits stressful and confusing.  I'm going to file this one in the nightmare category.