Spring on the branches of dream trees

Last night I dreamed of cherry blossoms appearing out of the darkness, and magnolias.

And I dreamed I had a baby and she was three by the time I noticed her standing there in the hospital room.  Somehow a hundred pencils spilled across the linoleum and so I taught her to catch rolling pencils.  How to put them away into the right cases.  We felt accomplished when it was done.

I used to have a pencil case I made from a chocolate box.  Godiva.  In the dream I had three.

There was a magnolia tree next to the house of my early childhood.  Inexplicably, at the end of spring, my sister and I once gathered the fallen petals from under that tree and wrapped them around rocks we found on the ground.  It seemed important.  To give those cold stones some soft protection.

There are cherry trees in Arnold Arboretum.  I used to pass them every day on my way to the train.  I could never stay on the sidewalk when I came to them.  I had to be under the branches, to step inside the world of all those blooms.  I was always late for work.  I don't think there are any cherry trees in my neighborhood now, but I do think I'll plant a garden.

What is it about dreams that tugs at me?  It is more than the message intended from my unconscious, it's the medium itself.  The images.  More real, somehow, than all the sensible hard things all around me.  Easier to engage.

If I am childlike (as I have been told), it is for this.  The better to enter into dreams.

When I woke up, I was dying for an iced cherry mocha (as I'm told Starbucks now has).  I guess after the dream, I decided spring had officially arrived and lent must be over.  I'm staying strong, though.  Office coffee it is.