Bits and Pieces

Dreams are things I don’t understand

They come to me in pieces, broken

jagged, belonging to someone

else, incomplete

I have their pieces.

Give me a story, I’ll tell you the meanings:

Behind a pregnancy in fall, the birth

in May. The large white

oaks in the cemetery. The cross

in your purse on an impossible day.

My grandfather died when I was ten. He came to me in a dream. He walked in the door as if nothing had changed, his body free of cancer. He hugged like only a grandfather can. The sandpaper chin scraped my cheek as he kissed it lightly. He sat with the family, enjoying his old fashioned sour with olives.  He spoke of the four-wheeler rides down to the woods.  He loved to spend his time there.  He talked as if he knew he was dead. He always was a believer in God. If you go to the woods, you can still feel him there, as if he never left.

I never really got to know that man. Young age doesn't allow for lasting memories.  So many little things I’ll never remember. But they happened and I was there. But the little things pass away as quickly as the years.

 “Use them up the way they are,”

he always used to say.

 I’ll never know what that means.