Years ago I owned a house in Maine. Originally built in the 1920s as a rustic getaway for wealthy people from Boston, this solid log home with a 20-foot granite fireplace, a pot-bellied stove in the kitchen area and numerous other very cool features had been well cared for by its previous owners. I wasn’t there long, but always wished I could airlift that house onto my current wooded property Virginia – if only airlifting houses were a thing!

The market fell through the floor around the time I needed to sell that house. It took me five years to find a buyer and I lost way more tens of thousands of dollars than one would ever want to lose. But I sold it and have the paperwork to prove it. So why do I have a recurring dream about owning a house in Maine?

Last night it was so real. There I was in the house, fretting about needing to sell it, troubled by the repairs that an un-lived-in house incurs, desperate to stop the leaks and inevitable other breakdowns while at the same time admiring the old and gorgeous woodwork. In my dream I even hired a chef to prepare a spread for potential buyers – the last thing in the world I would do because …(people don’t do that anyway, right?)… I love to cook!  I woke around 4, agitated by all this, and found myself telling myself that if I owned a house in Maine I would have to be paying taxes on a house in Maine, and I didn’t remember doing that any time recently, so I must not own a house in Maine.

At 630 I awoke cold – 59F in the house as it turned out because it was so warm yesterday there was no heat on and I forgot before going to bed that it was going to dip into the low-30sF during the night. While attempting to avoid having to get out of bed, I also again had to push away the house-in-Maine worries, play the broken record, reiterate reality: “You would have paid taxes, and you haven’t paid taxes, therefore you don’t own a house in Maine.”

That’s it, time for tea. Thank God for a warm robe and my super cute “Haflinger” woolen doggie slippers.

Having run out of propane (that runs my cookstove) the day before, I was grateful they had come to fill the tank and I could turn on a flame and know there would be hot water soon, one of the small comforts in my little world.  My new doggie cup was in the back of the cabinet…

(do I need a dog of my own one of these days or what? do you see the text inside: “all you need is love and a dog”?) … and having been hounded all night with false-homeowner fussing, I had no kind of temperament at that moment to patiently look for it. A person can take only so much.

Yeah, just when you think you’ve settled the question and it’s time to relax, you turn around wrong and the dish mats make you aware of their presence by somehow poking you. How did they do that? I don’t know. Yes, dish mats. I hang mine on the old dishwasher that doesn’t work. It makes a good hanging place because it has a lever (that presumably locked it for its dishwashing cycle, back when it had such a thing) that acts as a hook. The mats have to dry in between their jobs of being useful for standing wet dishes upon, and here they all were, inexplicably adding to my discombobulated morning.

I said to them out loud, “It’s too early to be attacked by a dish mat!”

One of those days. D’you know what I mean?