Recurring Archives - The Pure Life of Dreams

Karin had been planting arugula stalks in the swampy water.

I thought many looked they were past gone but she said, “No! Even the dried reedy bark ones are good.”

I didn’t like planting arugula myself as I had the wrong shoes for the grey swamp water, green espadrilles which let the water seep in. Ted’s shoes were better, they were also green but made of leather but he too didn’t like planting the thin reedy stalks. Only Karin was good at it.

We sat at the back of FG’s tenement building on a brick walled platform that overlooked the alley in the back. It was the three of us there, plus a local Costa Rican boy.

Karin and Ted sat quite close, their legs intertwined. Karin put a blue blanket over them and she rubbed his legs, partly to keep him warm, but maybe to do more. It made me jealous. Then she pulled a green corrugated aluminum canopy over Ted and herself so that me and the Costa Rican boy couldn’t see them at all.

The boy must have been jealous as well, because he tried to slide under the canopy to join them, before Karin interjected and made a loud noise, before she and Ted slid out from under the aluminum canopy then jumped down into the alley and ran away.

The boy ran after them, but when he jumped down from the wall, and landed in what he thought was a straw pile, it turned out that Karin had placed something underneath the surface of the straw, something hard, like bricks.

Instead of a soft landing he cried out in pain. Then he pulled at the straw to see what was underneath and yelled his annoyance.

Photo by timlewisnm via Flickr.

It was the place with the long monks’ corridor in the basement, marble muted brown coral swirled walls… The place with the crumbling bedroom walls, each room decorated in a different style, some with ornate cat wallpaper, others Victorian but they all had their plaster crumbling behind…

The cat wallpaper room had a balcony with its wooden balustrade rotting away and barely sturdy enough to step out onto. It looked out over the gardens which were surprisingly better kept. A marble tiled patio overlooking lush green grass.

The house spiraled. It was an interconnected space with unrelated styles, bits stuck onto bits. The monks’ corridor with its offshoot rooms for guests (the rooms were probably the most liveable in) led down to the side entrance which opened onto a small area between the door and a high grey fence. The fence shielded the property from a bare road that sloped into town.

We nearly bought the house even though it was clearly a fixer-upper. In a previous dream we did buy it, I think, but in this dream we’d rented it before buying the place next door.

Now the renovators were fixing it, so when they knocked on our door we naturally wanted to know how the renovations were going.

They’d already painted the top floor bedrooms, they said, in muted dark colours, a different colour for each room, and the plaster was no longer crumbling.

The cat room was now a soft dark blue hue. It was empty, same as it was when we lived there. They had painted the other rooms in softer, darker primary colors as well.

How about the monks’ corridor? I asked, but Siobhan wanted to ask something else so the renovators replied to her. They ignored my question until I asked it again.

The renovators wanted to know where the house connected to ours. I did not know that it did, until I thought back. Perhaps down by the end of the monks’ corridor, where a wide circular drain came up between the two houses. It led from their side entrance onto our side of the fence.

I asked again about the monks’ corridor.

We slept in the adjacent rooms there, when we were renting it, but they hadn’t got to that yet.

The corridor was one of the better preserved parts of the house, they replied.

Photo by Love Art Nouveau via Flickr.

Tag: Recurring

Planting Arugula at the Back of the Tenement Building

Renovating the House with the Monks’ Corridor