Uncle Floyd's house and Small beds

March 14, 2011

I was back at Uncle Floyd’s old house and since I didn’t think I’d remembered it correctly in a dream a few nights ago, I was looking at the layout from outside in detail.  Specifically, I didn’t think there had been a porch roof over the entry to the door in the kitchen and no wall next to it that I could have used to push up on.  What I saw this time confirmed that the earlier dream memories had been wrong.

This time I looked at the layout to see how the oldest section (closest to the road) had been connected to the kitchen.  This time there was an offset.  The oldest section faced north and the connection attached to the west side of the south face of the old part and connected to the east side of the north face of the kitchen.  This time the connecting section had a flat roof w/ parapets on the side. (In reality the house looked like a capital I, with the old section being the top crossbar, the connecting section being the stem and the kitchen being the bottom crossbar, and the roofs were all pitched.)

I went inside the living room (in the oldest section) and someone gave me a gallon jug of milk and asked me to take it to the kitchen.  I opened the door into the connecting section and several women were using it as a dressing room.  I put my arm up over my eyes as blinders and hurried through as quickly as I could.  They were pretty annoyed.  When I came through into the kitchen I had to duck my head because the ceiling was only about five feet high.  I opened the refrigerator and it had some half melted ice cream in it and was covered w/ frost about an inch thick.

Illinois football coach Ron Zook was standing behind me and when he saw me digging ice cream out of the fridge he got excited and said we should all have some ice cream.  So the men all went outside and ate ice cream while the women were still dressing in the middle room.

Later I went to visit Ellen & Kyle, but they lived on an island in the Pacific, not Mexico.  They were thinking about building an addition onto their house but were concerned about keeping it out of the water.  The soil around them was a red loess, which I remembered seeing and reading about in China.  Since they were planning to build they had a shovel handy, so I dug into the soil a little bit because I wanted to know what the famous loess felt like and how it behaved when worked.

March 15, 2011

Ruth and I went to some kind of event that involved an overnight stay where they separated the men and women.  The room all the men had to sleep in had rows of single beds packed in tightly to hold about 20 people.  The beds were built like baby cribs, with fences along the sides and solid boards at the ends.  I had the thought that it was going to be a cramped, uncomfortable night.  Then I noticed Mike Frerichs, the 6’-10” state senator, lying on his side, curled up to try to fit inside and sleep.

I wanted to talk to Ruth about something, but we weren’t supposed to have contact.  I saw her outside and we walked over and sat down on the pavement behind a parked car to hide while we talked.  A fairly continuous parade of people walked by from the other direction and didn’t look back to see us.