The Old Woman and Her Dreams

The old woman believed in dreams. She believed that a faithful heart made dreams come true. All one had to do was embrace a dream in their heart, to see it with the mind’s eye, and it would come to pass. She trusted that whatever you truly and faithfully believed would be what you experienced for eternity. Right now, however, the old woman’s dream was for a simple bit of strength.

The old woman might as well have been trying to break an oak log in half. Instead, she was simply, but unsuccessfully, trying to snap the long, thin, branch she held in her gnarled hands. She was trying to size the branch to fit into her small cook stove. After a few minutes of futile struggle, she simply set the unyielding piece of kindling down and resigned herself to defeat. She had learned to embrace defeat, rather than fight it, as if loss was an old friend. Long ago, or at least it seemed long ago, she stopped cursing her mounting inadequacies and inability to accomplish the simplest tasks, and accepted the inevitable: she was alone and alone she would stay. She shuffled her way to her old rocking chair and carefully sat down with a sigh.

She sat so still that if anyone were there to look upon her, they would think they were viewing a still-life painting. One would imagine her slight trembling to be nothing more than an illusion of breeze against canvas. Her shaking came with age. Age and a life of toil and hardship, but also a life filled with joy and ease. Either way, it had been a long life. She could not exactly remember how old she was. Not that it mattered, that information became useless and slipped away long ago. Lightheartedly, she would simply say that she was as old as dirt.

The old woman would be going hungry again. Fo...

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...side of her living room seemed far indeed. Still, the old woman gathered enough strength and fortitude to slowly but surely make her way to the bed and lie down.

There had been times when she reminisced about her youth and all the rashness that went with those invincible and immortal times. It had been an ephemeral time, yet seemingly without end. Now, as she rested quietly on her bed, she could see the enormity of the vanity of life and the futility of trying to deny the inevitable. For the inevitable had arrived.

The old woman believed that a faithful heart made dreams come true. She trusted that whatever you truly and faithfully believed would be what you experienced for eternity. So, as she lay upon her simple bed, in her simple home, taking her last breaths, she closed her eyes and held one thought, one truth, and one dream – the dream of being home.