Dreams or Memories?

Have you some recurring memory that swirls, like an insubstantial mist in your mind from time to time?

The problem is that though the feeling which accompanies the mind-pictures are real, I am never sure whether some of these evocative memories
are really memories at all;
or merely dreams
that have touched me in some way that causes them to linger.

This little water colour
done on gessoed paper,
is an attempt to capture something of one of my recurring
"dream memories".


My feeling is that I was quite small, perhaps a toddler,
and evening was drawing in.
I was cuddled on my father's shoulder against the cold,
and the sense I get is that there was an urgency about him
as we walked up the path
towards the house.

There was the hint of snow in the air,
along with the a strong wind tossing in the bare trees:
the house sitting in the lee of a steep hill.

As we approach the house the door opens,
light streams out
and I feel some of the anxiety of the moment drain away.
And there the fragment ends.

In some way that I can't explain there seems to be a connection
to my grandmother's death
attached to these impressions.

I have no way to check the veracity of this dream memory,
though I do know the house,
and that it at least is real.

When I came to paint my impressions,
as usual ,the subject dictated it's treatment,
and everything was pared down to essentials.

There was so little to hold on to ...
yet it keeps returning.

Perhaps it is important to me
because my father was away at war while I was young
and my memories of him then are so few.

I don't want to give you the idea I sit around
steeped in nostalgia all day
but there is another dream memory which I had already
decided must be totally devoid of any basis in truth,
but has turned out to be real after all.

And really very nice.

Tell you about it in my next post.

Be Blessed .