Dream Dress

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 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? 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 on the glittering rooftop of a sumptuous hotel or the porch of the family’s old shingled summer home. And after that one magical occasion, perhaps passed on to an equally accomplished and beautiful daughter or hung 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 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 in front of the square white windows showing dresses such as this…dreams all spun and webbed in the living room’s corners of the heart.