George’s Dream
by Hugh Findlay
George has a dream that George builds a new house because George is a carpenter and that is what he does, and just when George finishes his house a late spring snow comes and covers it up and covers up George too because he lets it, because George is a snow-man from the great white Canadian north and he likes it, the way the cold flies in and calms his mind, like a friend who has traveled the length of a continent to join him. A spring snow can do that, they say it is God’s way, and then George simply forgets where he has built his house. George has lost his house somewhere in America.
So time goes by as it must do and because George is a man with natural man tendencies, he makes his home with his American wife and kids and American dog and cat, until one day George is driving down an unfamiliar road on a sunny summer day and George suddenly finds the house that he had built and lost so many years before. So George stops and runs through his yard and vaults his steps and opens his door and finds a strange man living in his house, and George says to him this is my house, but the man looks at George and replies get out. Then George says I have my rights, and the man says go to hell and George sees the man’s wife and kids through the window to the back yard, and he recognizes their faces as the faces of his own wife and kids, and then George sees his own foreign face reflecting in the window and he feels betrayed. So George goes outside and sits down on the grass and looks up into the sky, and with no one to scream at or blame or talk to, simply feels the warm southern wind on his face.
And then he wakes up, and rolls over and looks at his wife’s face, and gets up and looks at his children’s faces, and he goes outside and stands in his yard, and looks at his house looking back at him under the murky soup of night sky, and George wonders if it will snow tomorrow.
Hugh Findlay’s writing and photography have been published worldwide. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2020 for poetry, he is in the third trimester of life and hopes y’all like his stuff. Instagram: @hughmanfindlay