For the past several years I've been having a recurring dream. It's always set on a cute, Vermont-ish, diversified animal farm: foals in one patch, goat kids in another, sheep in the meadow, cows in the corn; that kind of place. I'm supposed to be doing morning chores--feeding, watering, milking, mucking out--but all of a sudden I realize that for weeks I've entirely forgotten to take care of all the lambs or all the calves or whatever the livestock variety du noir might be. Panicked, I rush into that particular animal shed or out into that particular field and find, not dead or even dying animals, but confused, reproachful ones, usually lined up along the fence line or perhaps huddled into small groups, waiting for me to do the job I keep forgetting to do. Last night's dream had an additional feature: I was sharing a farmhouse apartment with a hip new roommate who turned out to have left lice all over the bathroom towels, although the bathroom itself was more like a beauty salon and not at all like the kind of bathroom one would really find in a farmhouse.

What-would-a-psychoanalyst-say-? does not especially interest me, nor would her remarks be too difficult to guess. It's the details of these dreams that cling: the whiteness of the lice-infested bathroom towels, the shape of the hills behind the sad knock-kneed calves, the sight of my mud-booted, hurrying feet as I rush to feed everything that needs to be fed. And all the while my glittering omniscient eye stares at exactly what I always forget to tend.