I had a vivid dream last night about the first house we landed in in Harmony, a falling-down rental farmhouse with all of the plagues of Egypt: no insulation in -40-degree weather, well ran dry in the summer, an infestation of flies . . . you name it, that house had it. Yet my dream was quite hopeful. The house was as bad as ever--worse even--but somehow my dream convinced me that all I needed to do was give it a really good cleaning and the place would be charming and lovable. This was a house that, even in its heyday, could never have been nice . . . a nineteenth-century version of a mobile home, we used to call it. But dreams are very convincing, and I woke up imagining that the South Road place was a secret delight, not a wreck falling off its foundation.

Now that I'm awake I'm wondering what I should take away from such a dream. Is this an attempt to rosy-up the past? Or to make me feel like I have the power to change bad into good? Or is my brain just wallowing in the details of stuff: toilet on the front porch, piles of mysterious cloth, cobwebs and dirt and sagging floors. Not all of this was actually on the premises when we rented the place, and for the year we lived in the house I did manage to keep it reasonably tidy, though structural decay made that hard. In other words, the dream stuff is not entirely memory stuff, though it feels natural to my idea of the place. This was the sort of house that should be full of garbage, though it was not when I lived there.

Details are dream clutter. Poem clutter, too. Do not think I am using the word clutter pejoratively.