Dream Dress Dreaming

Dream dresses look like this…I think this is a Vera Wang dress in her shop window on Manhattan’s upper East Side, but I can’t remember…all I know is that this dream dress is a web, a weaving, of dreams. To wear it, you would have to be tall, beautiful (but in a jolie-laid sort of way), accomplished (violin? poetry? venture capital? architecture, law? ballet?), well travelled, at least bi-lingual, financially secure, and probably vegetarian.

In short, perfect.

Most likely, this dress is a wedding dress to be worn once in an emerald garden or a sumptuous hotel or a glittering rooftop or the porch of the old family shingled house with the ocean beyond. And after that one magical occasion, perhaps passed on to an equally accomplished and beautiful daughter or hang forever in state in an upstairs guest room closet (all clean and sacheted, of course).

I look at the dream dress and I sense that it wishes otherwise…wants a different kind of future. Maybe something like this: to be worn on fresh Monday mornings while hanging out the sheets; or dancing in front of the fireplace on a mid-January night as the snow blankets the world; or apron-layered and rolling out a real pie crust; or driving in a perfectly ordinary car with the windows all down, headed west on a black October night; or making out in the front seat of that perfectly ordinary car by a dark green lake, the night fragrant with earth and iron and cornfields.

Maybe this dream dress makes its way to Port Clyde, Maine or Roslindale, Massachusetts or Honeoye Falls, New York or Quebec City or even Dublin or Venice or Paris or Tokyo. Or maybe it just stays put in its own back yard, happy there with the ordinary–the maples and cedars, the petunias, clover, and dandelions, the robins, the stray cats, the humming mowers and rusty swing-sets, the crooked snowmen and the barking dogs, the ordinary people, dreaming behind the square white windows of dresses such as this, of dreams all webbed and tangled in the ordinary living rooms of the heart.