I’m at the Finlay’s painting Emma’s bedroom. It’s late afternoon, Kate calls needing a ride home and Emma’s my navigator as we wend our way through the back roads.

As pure dialogue, this conversation sounds morbid. It wasn’t at all.

“My birthday is in five days?”

“Five days? I thought your birthday was in May?”

I had no idea when her birthday was.

“No, it’s January.”

“What are you going to be? Sixteen, seventeen?”

“No, thirteen.”

That much I did know.

“Emma, Do you dream?”

“No.”

“I mean, do you remember your dreams?”

“No. Do you?”

“I used to remember them better than I do now. I have a recurrent dream where I’m lost and I don’t know how to get where I’m going and sometimes I don’t even know where it is I’m going.”

“My friend Molly had a dream that lasted three nights.”

“Three nights? What do you mean? Like she’d get up in the morning and then that night she’d take up where she left off?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. She should write it down. Do you know what it was about?”

“Did you see The Dawn of the Dead?”

“Yes.”

“It was like that… .”

“With dead people crawling out of graveyards?

“Dead people that were infected. One of them crawled through a dog door.”

“And died?”

“He was already dead. The good guys didn’t think he could crawl through the dog door but he did.”

“And he killed the good guy.”

“Yeah. I died in the third dream.”

“How did you die?”

“I don’t remember.”

Spurred on, perhaps, by our discussion, I scored a trifecta this morning. In one dream I was lost AND I was running in molasses. In another I was to give a speech in front of a group of people, but I was in a panic because I had forgotten to prepare.

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Peter, Diane, Eileen and Linda. Moving day, Acton, 1983.
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We’re off to Boothbay Harbor and a night in the Admiral’s Quarters Inn . Thank you Auntiesue.

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Eileen Foley and Peter Miller.
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Adam listened to many tales of Peter and Eileen’s year-round living in Ed’s cabin on Grok Hill, in Gilsum NH, before he made his first trip past the Preston’s, past the wide metal gate, past the tree-ringed field that served as the Rakitty’s wedding chapel, down the steep hill and up again, left onto Beech Lane, past the Littel’s and finally the long trek up to the hand-crafted cabin heated by wood stove and lit by candles. The first words from an uncharacteristically silent Adam as he poked his head into the cabin? ìWhat a woman!.”

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Emily Hopkins
Unrelated to any of the above. Martha’s Vineyard, summer, 1982
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