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Although I still await the official arrival of the midyear solstice, "every sign close to nature" (as Sting eloquently sang) points to madame summertime's arrival. Like trumpeteers before her approaching carriage, a violent summer thunderstorm shook Le Cottage Bleu with its mighty percussion during the hours preceding daylight this morning. In response, I sat straight up and flailed my appendages like a harpooned octopus, startling my poor husband straight out of a rather enjoyable fishing dream -- for this, I feel terribly guilty. He so rarely enjoys dreaming. Nine nights out of ten, he's usually arguing with his mother within his tortured head.

I, on the other hand, enjoy the luxury of experiencing dreams that are mostly pleasurable, if not simply curious.... I often dream of houses, lands, forests, rooms -- spaces to occupy and wear like a sweater jacket, meaning that their character remains, even as I take it on and mold it to my proportions. Many times an object or an idea from a dream will hook me, and suddenly I have the image permenantly affixed within my head and I'm set on a mission to retreive or create the incarnation of the dream-thing. Awainting in the cluttered storage facility of my mind are a hand-carved stone fireplace mantle, an open-air library, a rough-hewn shipwood table, an underground Spanish mission with tiles and candleabras worked into the walls of its catacombs, an old crone's house where vegetables stew and herbs and roots are dried from the pine rafters... this is the stuff of my summer reveries. Fortunately, I need not wander far from home to see them realized.

Our marriage home has become an other-world reflection of these subconscious desires; under the direction of husband-dear -- who inherited from his maternal grandmother's discernment for visual harmony -- he and I have created a living space that have incorporated many of these elements, even without him realizing it! So many of the things we've chosen as a couple to bring into our home point toward his eye for beauty and my preference for whimsy. The little wooden and plaster fat birds peeking from random corners of my kitchen belong to that dream world. So does the recycled church furniture. A library -- open air or not -- is a completely achievable goal, and we're well on our way. Even the pond concealed by a curtain of shaggy adolescent pines has been a visiting-portal for so many of the places I've taken comfort in, even if they only exist in my imagination.

I'm grateful for the fruits of an overactive imagination. I think it's a gift to have such a lens through which to view my life. I know that it pleases the Creator when gifts He has bestowed are developed with the intention of furthering His work, yet many people might not place nightly appearitions within this category, considering it a rather spooky and intangible. But I do. I told one of our "kids" Wednesday night that sometimes I fail to see God's hand in what I've done until I look back upon it and am able to identify his fingerprints all over what I believed was my personal masterpiece. Manipulating one's environment to reflect a heart that rejoices in all that God has given can be a way of "multiplying talents" (Matt. 25:13-30).

"....whatever you do, do all to the glory of God." (1 Cor. 10:31)