Dreaming

         There I am living in a beautiful old windmill, creamy white textured walls. I don't remember any other colour, furnishing. Everything seems certain and solid. But then cracks start to show and one warm summer day blisters appear on the inside walls, like when damp escapes through the ceiling of an upstairs room, only it's on the walls. The windmill , I realise, is made of cheese, and the upper chambers are splitting like mozzarella, cracking like feta, blistering like a grilled goats cheese. I try to rescue something from the damaged upper rooms, desperate to hold on, but to what I'm not sure: mementos of a past that give me definition, photos, keepsakes, something that proves who I am, who I have been, but the stairs slew sideways and the expedition becomes as much about clawing the walls as it is about climbing the stairs. It is difficult to find anything in the crumbling rubble. I give up and resign my past to the rennet damp and stay down below. It is time to let go, time to move on. But I don't seem to be able to let go on my own.
         Some inexorable force  pulls me backwards through the walls as I claw at the insubstantial structure of my past, trying to hold on but I get nothing but crumbling  feta beneath my nails to show for my efforts. And then it is gone, a windmill life wiped from existence, like a theatre scene-change, the whole reality shifts into something that only existed in my mind. I am left standing in an alpine meadow bereft, waiting for Julie Andrews to sing the glory of creation into my soul.
         Here she comes. There is hope for a new beginning then: a rainbows  end beyond what I had believed were the confines of stability, reality. I march and run with her and twirl my Austrian skirts, climbing onto  puffs of marshmallow pink and white cloud which merge into spiral stairs, corkscrewing up though blue sky to a rose dripping gothic archway and  a Sissinghurst in the sky.  This seems more real than the windmill ever was,  now it is in front of me, and yet I know it to be impossible.
        Light flickers and the reality changes, images clicking out of time like an old fashioned film reel, home movies projected onto wood chip walls.  I find myself in tight stays and a stiff gown, sitting at a long polished refectory table, surrounded by people in Georgian wigs, a promenade of carnival masks,powdered faces and painted lips. Everyone is turning this way and that, noticing no one but waiting to be noticed; looking around the room to see who is looking back at them, where to curry favour. The air is laced with tension, expectation and rivalry. Servants bustle about puffed up with their own importance. Being busy and achieving nothing . There is no conversation and yet there is noise, a clash of unspoken slights and jealousies and judgements.
          A bugle sounds and one of the servants in a livery of green needlepoint waistcoat with gold buttons and matching trews, claps his hands. A stone wall is drawn apart like curtains the stones falling into folds revealing a grand terrace surrounded by roman balustrading. We gather at the opening, an eye onto another kingdom, and watch as great ostrich plumes in cream,red and gold explode in the sky like fireworks then fly away to the horizon. I hear a lone piper and realise there is a little girl tugging at my stiff skirts, my hand, wide eyed raggle-taggle haired, muddy faced. She is the image of myself as a mud pie making Tom-girl about two years old. She is unconcerned with etiquette and social proprieties. I watch her free spirited dance  and try to breath only feeling  the constraint of my stays, the stiff formality of fabric  supported by the disapproving glances from the gathered crowd, the tuts, the whispers as the child laughed and twirled and shone. The distaste emanating from the crowd spreads like an ink stain, like mustard gas, threatening to occlude my view of her  happiness and choke her freedom and yet she dances still.
      She dances to the piper, skipping and twirling, closer, closer to the edge of danger or safety, closer to the broken edges of polite order. The notes the piper plays are released as soap bubbles floating into the air, rising a note at a time, calling to my heart, hypnotic, like the pied pipers song. I call her too me, my younger self and she tugs at my hand, wanting to share her wonder.  I am holding the little girl's hand in mine protectively, not wanting her to be hurt, not wanting her to fall. I am torn between wanting to keep her safe and wanting to relish her spirit, her joy. The kernel of an idea cracks open in my heart and takes root, sending out shoots and leaves, it flourishes . I  don't want to let her go. I want to go with her, be her.
     I tear my cloth prison in two, stepping out of its stiff form. It remains standing like a discarded bean pod. I have been contained but now I am free. I swing the child high, celebrating our oneness then watch the soap bubble notes of the piper come within touching distance. We step inside a bubble and sheathed in its gossamer film, float from solid ground, from imposed constraints, to freedom, an uncertainty laced with joy and  happiness.