This is Home, Part 28 - Electricity, mail, Mom shopped, the lunch counter, crops, gardens and pesticides, no irrigation, the plane in the pasture

This is part 28 of my mother's book about her life, written in 2004.



Electricity

President Roosevelt's rural electrification program worked. Somewhere around my Freshman year, we got electricity, as did our neighbors. The white light was lovely compared to the yellow lamp light.

Mail

The men had moved the mailbox up by the garage. The carrier came by in his Model A. I used to run out and get the mail and he started holding out Edgar's letter to me and saying, "He sent you a letter today."

Sometimes, when it was cold and bad, the mail carrier would come into the house, sit by the fire awhile, and have a cup of coffee and talk.

Edgar and I used air mail stamps on our letters. They were five cents. A regular stamp was three cents.

Mom shopped

Sometimes, Uncle Doc would take mom to town while we were at school. When we got home, we would find new skirts and blouses on our beds. Sometimes, we would have sweater sets instead. Socks, too, with either.

I liked -- and still like -- wool skirts because they fit well and feel good. Of course, they had to be dry cleaned.

The lunch counter

When I was in college, I had a friend, Nancy, who worked at a pharmacy. They had a lunch counter she worked behind. I used to eat there everyday. I could get a grilled pimento cheese sandwich or a ham salad for fifteen cents and a Coke for five cents. No tax. Sometimes, I would have the chicken salad sandwich for 20 cents plus a Coke for five cents.

Things were a lot cheaper then, but income was less.

Crops, gardens and pesticides

Crops and gardens were never sprayed with anything on either farm. No other farmer in our area sprayed crops, either. The noise of a plane close to the ground and a cloud of what looks like dust is not something one could hide.

The soil on the big farm was very acid. Sometimes -- years apart -- Daddy would lime the fields to improve the soil. I can only remember this happening three times, but it could have happened when I was gone.

Actually, I think the acid soil was responsible for the beautiful color of the flowers and how well everything grew.

Daddy planted more grass in the yard for several years, then waited a few years. He had a sort of sack-like thing with a strap over the opposite shoulder that he put seed in and threw it out by hand as he walked around the yard. The yard was planted with bluegrass and some other grass. I keep thinking rye, but the description in the dictionary doesn't sound anything like the grass we had. The grass was very tender, cool blades that were single. It actually felt soft. The yard was covered with grass. So were the pastures.

No irrigation

There was also no irrigation. Water was provided by the frequent rains.

We had a changeable, capricious weather pattern. There was a saying back there: "If you don't like the weather, wait a while and it will change."

The plane in the pasture

One summer day, a small private plane landed on the rise in the pasture. This was the pasture between the house and the mailbox. The side David and I saw.

The men must have seen it come down, because by the time the pilot walked to the house, they were all coming into the yard. They got the container or containers of gasoline the pilot needed and he invited all of us to come see his plane. So we all walked over in the pasture with him and admired the plane.

See, one never knows what interesting thing will happen on a farm! I must have been in late grade school or early high school at that time.

Dream - The plane like a fly, and as Spider-Man I am captured and taken deep under the ground

On Thursday morning, September 11, 2008, I had a dream about a military operation involving a plane like a giant fly, and then I went through a dimensional portal and became Spider-Man, or someone like him, and was captured and taken to a place deep under the ground.

In the dream it was night, and I was in Fallon, Nevada or someplace like it. I was driving through town in the direction toward work and I got to or stopped at the Safeway (the one at the original Fallon location). It was farther from the road in the dream and down a very sharp slope from it. I parked along the road with a few other cars, above the very steep slope to the parking lot.

A plane like a giant fly, with huge diffuse lights on the front where the eyes would be and one on each wing, though one was out, came over the car and landed. It may have turned to face the car as it landed.

I walked down to the store. Girls from work showed up. They were all or mostly all people I didn't know in real life or actually worked with. Maybe some were already there, but I think some were coming in around the time I was. We started going around inside the Safeway (the one at the original Fallon location), grouped tightly together, against each other and bumping against each other and laughing. We were shopping, but I'm not sure now for what or whether anything was actually bought.

I finally thought I had to leave. The mood had changed somewhat. It seemed something was happening. I think maybe some word or indication came that the military was looking for me or perhaps looking for someone else, it might not have been for anyone we knew. I'm not sure we really knew what exactly was happening.

I went back out and went toward my car. Dark helicopters were flying and shooting down beams of light. I was with one or more of the girls still. I almost made it up the slope, but then turned back. A couple of people on foot, up near the road with flashlights, started to come in my direction. I went onto a stairway that went in long, narrow, rectangular circles down into a deep, almost bottomless rectangular room-sized pit. In some places the stairs were very narrow, only inches, though they always had railings. Though it was dark outside, the stair area was lit from somewhere. I'm not sure where the lights would be, but it was lit all the way down.

There was someplace at the very top that the stairs disappeared into, that looked almost like bulging, slightly crumpled white paper. I tried to get up to and through it at one point, but I had to stop then, because it was taking too much time and they were getting too close. I was intentionally falling down the stairs at one point, just supporting myself on the rails and swinging or jumping out past huge blocks of stairs at a time, and then actually outside the rails, just grabbing at the railings to break my fall as I fell past down the endless stairs. The people after me never seemed very far behind somehow. I think I might have then made it back to the top somehow and through the paperlike barrier and to the other side. I did get through somewhere some way.

Then I was on the other side, running and dodging among the various white rooms there and the rows of tall metal shelves in them, seeming to imagine and then see Spider-Man doing it and then quickly becoming him, or at least becoming someone acting the part.

As Spider-Man, I was trying to escape, going over and along stacks of tall metal shelves filled with things, shooting webs and swinging from them, also shooting them at people and their weapons. There always seemed to be a delay when I tried to shoot the webs out and I was a little puzzled at it, looking at my wrist and wondering why it wasn't happening. Then some device or chemical they used on me made the webs stop, my wrists just shot dampness that I couldn't see until the person I was aiming at was covered with drops and wetness. Then they stopped working completely, and my wrists shot nothing at all.

I was trapped and captured, and brought to a strange, middle-aged mutant woman with a body that had odd irregular lumps. She was apparently supposed to read my mind and also control it, to make me docile and do their bidding. The lumps on her body moved around when I pushed at them, like they were just wads of cotton. I ended up with my hand full of dark, bronze colored metal-like needles, slightly curved on one side and perhaps one and a quarter to one and a half inches long, that her body had produced as a defense. I spent some time, then, pulling them out, groups of them at a time. I pretended that she had succeeded in her attempt to control my mind, but I'm not sure how much was pretense.

I was taken far, far underground, maybe brought back to the endless flights of stairs going down, though it seems more like I might have been brought to a similar place inside the barrier. I'm not sure now. We didn't actually use the stairs, we went down through some elevator-like device or maybe even partly through some kind of dimensional portal.

I was taken down to the last few stories, and then to someplace near or on the bottom, where plants were grown to use to make purple dye for toys. At this point the dream was mostly in black and white, though some pale color was sometimes seen. I was a worker doing whatever was assigned, though new people were generally given the most menial of tasks.

I planned to escape somehow when I got the chance. I had some small device that I had picked up or was given to me by someone. The device was supposed to help me escape in some way, maybe overpower the guards (most of the people seemed to either be guards or definitely on the side of them, though), or the device may have been more to unlock a doorway out or open some other way of passage out. It seemed like I would be passing between dimensions somehow when I left. I seemed to become a little afraid to try, though, and wasn't really sure I would.

The place seemed to be mostly a field with rows of things growing in it, though people were also working on toys that were returned or that needed more work before they were sent out. There were boxes filled with them, some boxes three or four feet high and some smaller. Some of the boxes were shaped like houses. Some of the problems were just with toys being improperly colored and color had to be added. The toys were various colors, not all purple, though we were concerned with growing plants that could be used to make purple dye and maybe crushing them and extracting the dye from them.

Then I got away somehow. I got past the people and went to a somewhat higher control area. It seemed that someone else was there first, that someone had come, maybe from the other side of the barrier. They went back after showing me how, but I was now looking through things, at the white wall and the devices on it and looking at the wall behind me and the things there. Some were pipes and some were metal boxes, all painted white. I was looking for a door or some other way through, maybe activating some device or mechanism and somehow slipping through an opening or even into where the device was attached to the wall, flowing into and through it. I had forgotten how it was done. I was worried, too, about someone finding me there. I worried about them noticing I was gone and looking for me. Somehow I finally got through and to the other side.

I was above ground then, in some big building. The building had a lot of lights, but it still didn't seem brightly lit. The walls were dark. There were conveyor belts and a section at the right, from my perspective facing toward the front, with huge bins with clear plastic covers over them, like some kind of smorgasbord. Some of the bins contained identifiable food, but everything in them was kind of dark. The darkness may have been a trick of the lighting used. Workers in white protective clothing, almost like containment suits, were working at them, putting more in some of them. A grainy mudlike substance was in some of the bins and also on a big area of the wide conveyor belt, blocking it.

There was also a contest going on, something about the bins and the conveyor belt, and traveling down the conveyor belt, and people in a hurry to complete it, but I don't remember the details now (I am adding to this last section on December 2, 2008, almost three months after the dream). The high area where I was also seemed to be part of a huge theater, with lots of rows of seats leading down to the front on a downhill slope to a stage.

Dream - Driving back home and also following the car in a small plane

On November 29, 2008, Saturday morning going into early afternoon, I had a series of dreams. In one of the later ones I was driving back home, and later in the dream was also in a small plane, following the car.

In the dream I was on a freeway, apparently in the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile, driving back home from Nevada. I was in a city, or on the outskirts of one. I think I had already gotten to Arizona and was somewhere in the Phoenix area, somewhere on the north side.

I got to where several sections of freeway were coming together, crossing in a mess of lanes. The road rose up and the car slowed down. I hit the cruise control button a couple of times to give it more power and increase the speed, seemingly reaching down and hitting it from way up in the air outside the car. Indeed, it was like I was watching the whole thing from high above. I wanted to get past some other cars in the right-hand lane, some of which were turning off to the freeway to the right, but some were going or might be going to merge with my lane. I got past them, or some of them. My speed, which had earlier been around 57 or 58, and had been dropping to near 55, now increased to near 60 as I approached the top of the rise in the road. I worried some about getting caught by the police, but it didn't seem important or likely.

Suddenly I saw where booths had been set up in the lanes, with policemen in them. They were there to catch speeders, but in fact people couldn't get past them without slowing way down, whether they were speeders or not, and they seemed to be checking and processing almost everyone. I slowed way down. They were talking to each other and though I think I stopped there for a while, they didn't seem to be concerned with or care about me so I went on, still wondering about the situation and whether they would decide to come after me. I was not alone in the car now. There was at least one other person there, maybe another, too. I'm not sure if they were there before, but it seemed normal.

The road turned left, then, and went into some ornate tunnels. There were many lanes, some going the other way, with high walls going to the ceiling every couple of lanes. The ceiling was not very high, barely enough room for a tall truck.

I was also flying a small plane with someone, watching over my car. After the car went into the tunnel we discussed whether we could follow it, whether it was safe and whether there was room in the tunnel. I finally decided to go and do it, we had to follow the car. Apparently we couldn't be seen by anyone.

We somehow slowly swooped in, the wings somehow getting a little smaller, contracting enough to barely fit inside the tunnel. We got over the car, or almost over the car, and then saw something ahead. It was a tall truck filling the lane to the top. At first it seemed to be the back of the truck, but as we got closer to it, and it got closer to us, I could see that it was somehow coming our way, in the same lane we were in. It seemed very ominous in the dream, but it didn't quite sink in that the truck was going the wrong direction.

The dream scene seemed to flash several times, both at the time we initially saw the truck and as it got closer, and as the truck and the car and the plane got closer in things seemed to move in slow motion, and finally I saw that there was a huge ornate projection to the left that protruded way into the lane just above the cars, going almost to the ceiling. The plane wouldn't be able to get past it, and the truck couldn't either.

Everything was slowing to a stop, it was almost as if time was slowing down, and I slowly woke up. As I woke up or just after, while I was still a little in the dream, I decided that among my other powers I now had the power to shrink the plane to the size of a toy (why not?), and the tiny plane now flew high and to the side among the ornateness of the ceiling, out of danger of being hit by the truck.