I grew up in the sort of town where front yards are decorated quite unironically with hay bales in the fall. Where faithful locals will rebuild and restore the landmark fountain no matter how many drunken drivers crash into it. Where Nina Levy’s Big Baby was exhibited, and vandalized, on the lawn of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum just a quarter of a mile down the road from the Keeler Tavern, with a Revolutionary War cannonball still lodged in its side. Where high school football games are sponsored by four family owned and operated since businesses, and also: Pepsi-Cola. Where the change in the seasons makes the front page four times a year and the recent bank robbery will make the front page every week for a whole season.
I remember hearing one of my mother’s friends comment about the higher-and-higher cost of living in Ridgefield and the surrounding towns and villages. “It’s a shame,” she said to me, “that you kids might not be able to buy a home in the town where you grew up. If that’s what you might want. You should be able to do it.” I thought immediately of my friend Melissa. Ambitious, competitive, fierce Melissa. She works hard, she plays hard. She worries about raising kids in a conservative community like Ridgefield. I thought about her buying a house in our home town, but not me. I’ve never thought that far ahead.
I have the same dream on the first night of almost every visit home. I’m in my bed, in my room, in my house. All the furniture is facing the right direction and the rooms are arranged properly and the house is actually my own, even though I almost always dream about puzzling fusions of different places and times. The hallway light is on and I’m watching the crack where the light shines through, waiting for that negative space to blink dark as my mom or my dad walks across the hall.
I dream that I’m too hot and I don’t know what time it is. I’m so preoccupied with these discomforts that I don’t notice my dog in bed with me until she starts growing. She is curled up in the narrow space between my body and the edge of the bed with her back against my stomach and her front paws folded against her belly. I dream her expanding, inflating, multiplying in size to cover me and then the whole bed, eventually filling the room with puppy ears as big as blankets, a tail the size of a tree, pieces of fur the length of my arm.
When I wake up, I discover that Maggie is, indeed, in my bed with me, curled up a little too close in her happiness to have me at home again. I’m too hot and I don’t know what time it is. I know she’ll jump off the bed and relocate to my parents’ floor if I move at all. Her warmth is nearly suffocating, but I kind of like the company. I lie still, hot and thirsty and somewhat disoriented, willing her to move, hoping she won’t.
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