Memories

I am visiting my mother, in the town where I grew up. Out walking the other day, we met the owner of the Bed and Breakfast that is located in the house where my best friend lived when I was a child. I told her that I dream I am in the house all the time. She invited us in and I found that though it had been converted to a Bed and Breakfast, the old house was very much unchanged. This house was built around 1880, my mother's house in the 1870's. Both are full of the ghosts of memories.


Two little ghosts with Dutch bobbed hair
Chestnut brown and gold
Forty years of breaths ago
The dreaming house was old

Already mellow and ancient
It dozed beneath the trees
Where we wove rainbows of laughter
On ribbons of summer breeze

Our finger-painted secrets
Ideas growing wild
As it cradled our vivid imaginings
The old house softly smiled

The rocket-ship in the linden tree
Went to Mars on fantasy power
On the balcony, dressed in antique lace
We looked down from the Eiffel Tower

In the attic we called up spirits
Devised the ideal school
Spun in the first breathless whirl of love
With four lads from Liverpool

Within the aged dreaming walls
No conception was too far out
My kaleidoscopic creations
Were embraced without question or doubt

And I learned to vision in technicolor
Write a world that is more than it seems
I learned to create with huge bright strokes
I learned to believe in my dreams

And in dreams the old house reappears
I wander from room to room
Feeling the plangent pulse of time
Break and blossom and bloom

Memories whisper in empty halls
A dreaming spell is cast
One little ghost walks through mellow old walls
And runs laughing into the past


~ Edwina Peterson Cross ~