A1A South

I had the strangest dream last night. I was outside doing chores around the place (putting up new fence) while SwampMan was at work. I looked up and a glowing object streaked across the sky, perhaps a meteor. Showing a rather uncharacteristic lack of curiosity for me, I returned to my chores as soon as it disappeared over the horizon. As the afternoon progressed, I ceased my outdoor labor and went inside to cook dinner for SwampMan’s arrival. He never arrived. I called his number but got nothing. Well, perhaps he’d gotten very engrossed in a project and didn’t remember to turn the phone on, but I hadn’t even gotten the voice mail. Strange.

I went back outside, then realized how very quiet it was. No vehicles going up and down the road. No trains. No airplanes. No lawnmowers. I frantically went back inside and called everybody I knew. Nothing. I realized that I was completely alone except for the livestock and Puppy. I was so upset that I sat straight up, heart pounding, with the problems before me. How much longer would the electricity last? How would I get water? I didn’t put in a fall garden because of the drought. How will I feed myself and the livestock? I couldn’t get back to sleep.

Well, Swampman was sleeping soundly, so I crossly told myself that if that happened, I could just take a wheelbarrow up the feed store and haul what I needed home, and the critters could graze off the neighbors’ property. Sheesh. Then I could loot the local grocery store, the pharmacies, and Walmart. With those thoughts, I was eventually able to go back to sleep shortly before the alarm went off.

I told Mom about it when she got back from the doctor’s office this afternoon.

“What do you think it means? Maybe it was one of those rapture things, and it was a warning from God that I was definitely going to be left behind.” We contemplated my town and my neighbors, and both said “Naaaah”. If there were a rapture-type event, I don’t think anybody would even notice.

Mom opined that I’d fallen asleep to news about the space junk falling and incorporated it into a dream state. Possible. I remember hearing something about it before I fell asleep. Was the television on when I woke up? I don’t remember!

I thought that there was a possibility, too, that my subconscious was trying to get my attention about preparing for bad times ahead with the message that the only one I (or anybody, for that matter) have to rely on for help is myself/themselves.

Mom said that she frequently has a recurring bad dream of coming out of a shopping center at night (she never shops at night) and, when the dream takes place, it is always a dark and stormy night, and she cannot locate her car.

“Hunh”, I said. “I’ve NEVER had that bad dream. Maybe it’s because I can never find mine in real life when I go shopping, so THAT wouldn’t be a bad dream. It would just be my life. Besides, mine was worse. You just lost your car. I lost all mankind.” Mom didn’t think losing most of mankind would be such a bad thing. “What if we woke up and all the politicians in the world were gone?” We happily contemplated that thought for awhile. What a wonderful world it could be!

SwampMan has recurring bad dreams that he’s a small child being pursued by an angry gorilla or that he’s hiding in a closet and something horrible is walking toward the door and turning the knob. Yikes.

I took the day off from work today in order to get long overdue bloodwork done, and then to head up to Georgia to sit with my stepdad so that Mom could go to her doctor’s appointment. My doctor was 45 minutes further away from Georgia, then I needed to go back home, pick up some eggs for Mom, stop by the beauty shop and make a hair appointment, maybe stop at a restaurant for lunch, and then to Georgia. I figured I’d be back home in time to do some good cooking for a change instead of some fast cooking.

Well. My bloodwork that I was assured would be a simple in and out operation ended up taking over an hour. Another woman was waiting over an hour, too, so it wasn’t just me! I started to get a little nervous. When I said I wanted bloodwork done, I didn’t mean that I wanted them to take it ALL! It also confirmed what I thought when the office told me that it would be NO PROBLEM AT ALL for me to get my blood drawn before work and make it to work on time. (That thought was “bullshit!”)

I returned home, picked up my eggs, completely forgot to take something out of the freezer for our nicely cooked meal, ran into the beauty salon where I found that I could have gotten my hair cut if I hadn’t been waiting to get my blood drawn and made an appointment for tomorrow afternoon instead, and headed up to Georgia.

Instead of fine dining (or at least eating someplace SwampMan didn’t like but I did), I settled for a quick sammich at Michael’s Deli in Folkston. When I arrived at Mom’s, we had time for a quick chat before she had to leave to make her appointment. We noticed some gathering clouds and wondered if it was going to rain before she left.

About 15 minutes after she left, it poured down rain. Bob and I were watching sports on the satellite television, and naturally it went out. I asked where his oxygen bottle was in case the electricity went out to his breathing machine, located it, and felt much better. We talked about sports, the past, heaped verbal abuse on every politician we could think of as well as various NFL and college football coaches. It was fun. We were sitting in the dark the whole time, blinds drawn, lights off, because light hurts his eyes. Then the phone rang. I couldn’t find it in the dark. Heh. He finally decided that maybe opening the blinds to watch the rain wouldn’t hurt his eyes too bad!

I was glad that I was there, as Mom’s doctor’s appointment took three hours. It was raining so hard when the doc and his staff were en route to this clinic that they had to pull over to the side of the road and wait until the downpour lightened up somewhat. It would have been really tough on my poor stepdad to wait in the dark for that long with lightning striking all around and the phone out of reach, wondering if the next lightning strike would cut off the electricity and his breathing machine, and he would die of asphyxiation.