It's not her house at all, not even a little bit, and I don't know why I think it is. She's not there. It must be the mess, there's a half eaten banana on the floor, one of her pets doubtless, and a bunch of half-eaten snails on the floor, dropping right there onto the wood in front of me, while I'm watching, and I'm thinking it's maybe her cat or her hedgehog, not her hedgehog, her daughters, do hedgehogs eat snails? And it's strange, it's not so messy, there's very little furniture, mostly floor, and the lighting, it's the yellow light of memory...
I go to the bathroom, small, dingy, lit in cigarette tones of yellowed nicotine, ...
Back into the living room, post-war wooden flooring, long rooms, bigger than a bungalow, not her place at all...
...back into the bathroom, it's changed, now there's a double wide chest to floor crazed porcelain urinal, still the same yellow light of childhood, memory, behind me there are a couple of doors that lead into bedrooms, one of them might be mine, old paint walls, wooden doors, I know this place from another dream...
I go out into the backyard. It must be spring or fall, the trees and grass are all still brown...There are neighbors, they're having a BBQ, a bunch of them standing around in the yard, and so I walk into it, there's all sorts of stuff there, looks like a garage sale, I poke through the stuff, trying not to poke through, not to be intrusive, it might not be a garage sale after all, mostly old 70s junk anyways, nothing good, ...
...out the back of their yard, and I'm on the banks of Kootenay Lake, only here it's a river, it's high or it's low, raging, there's an island just a dozen or so yards offshore, I want to get to it, but the lake, the river, its waves are higher than the banks, 5 feet, deep blue, green, there's no way I can swim or wade across...