The Yellow Trampoline

Last Thursday night, I dreamed of my cousin Miriam (Mim) bouncing on a yellow trampoline. Different from the one above, but you get the gyst. The trampoline was in the driveway of the home where Mim lived with my Aunt Kaye and my Papa when she was a kid. The old RV my grandfather owned parked on the right side, the trampoline on the left. It was all very vivid.

In the dream, as she bounced, she was laughing this outrageously happy giggle that filled up my sleeping ears and reverberated after I awoke. She was still a teenager in my dream, the way I remember her best. In bell bottom denim pants and a heathered t-shirt with piped sleeves. Her curly, crazy pigtails popping up and down by her face. Occasionally, she'd say the word "RISE" through her laughter. Clear as a bell, but wrapped in that intense laughter.

I called out to her, loud. But she didn't answer. She was so lost in what seemed a moment of profound joy. I called again before I woke up in my room, smiling.

My dad called a couple of hours later to tell me that Mim had passed away that morning after a long battle with breast cancer. I hadn't had any idea that the end was so near when I last spoke with her in early July.

I called my Aunt Kaye yesterday. I felt it important for her to know about my dream. My Aunt Kaye believes in the sensitivity some of us (including Mim) have - those connections to the things we cannot see. So I told her about the dream.

And she said, quiety. "Isn't that funny. Two weeks ago, someone gave us a big yellow trampoline. Mim thought it would be good for her daughers and Ann (her sister) to use. It's out in the yard by your grandfather's old RV."

So here's the thing. It's got me thinking of the "what happens" after. After this - the here and now - I mean... And about whether there never really is an after - just a now that we "live" in different ways. And about whether I should continue to welcome in and in turn pass on the things I sometimes know - from dreams or feelings... It's always been easy to let them in - it's the saying it out loud that I struggle with.

But the yellow trampoline is just another confirmation for me that time and our measurement of it are just things dreamed up by humans to define what we can never really define and that the reality of our reality is that you never really know what IS REAL.

I do know though, that Mim is resting (or bouncing, as the case may be) peacefully. That she left this time/place/reality to take the next step - and that she did it with some level of joy in her heart.