I was making a return trip and people were messing with the path. Someone was trying to put decrepit stakes up on the wall. I kept taking them down. "I don't want it to look like a roadhouse!"
They didn't mind me. They didn't get that it was my house. I had to be more forceful. They stopped, but then seemed to want to stand over me while I did the work they had planned to do.
(Gee, could any of this come from my neighbour saying she was going to plant roses in my mostly-empty rosebed and getting offended because I refused, preferring the care-free wood chips around the remaining rose to which I'm quite sentimentally attached? And now I'm feeling pressured because I haven't done the weeding of the beds yet, which she seemed skeptical about me doing in the first place.)
Somehow peace was made. I looked in one of the little shrubs and there were hamsters! Well, yes, hamsters are popular in England, but who would expect them to be wild and living in the shrubbery?
I thought they were Syrians and I picked up one banded one and cooed over it. It was perfectly docile. Then I looked just past the enclosed path (a bit like Mom and Dad's enclosed sunroom) and saw a grey tabby. I turned halfway to the woman, who was only half-listening, and said "Is that my cat?"
Jane? Jane? I went over and looked at the tag, which grew to the size of a saucer. Jane?
No, it was some long name beginning with a T and containing many slender vowels. Then I looked above it and there was Mom's name. Like an order form filled out. Wait, the T-name wasn't the cat's name, it was the cat's prescription drug! And then the T-name became "Prednisone."
Jane seemed happy and well and of course now he would come home with me. His stripes were more vivid, but he was still dear Jane. I looked at his legs and they were grey bone below the knee, like he was wearing short pants.
I got out my cell phone and tried to call the States to exclaim the news, trying to remember the country code and whatnot, and the phone number which was, oddly, 50050. I had to look at Jane's "tag" a few times to remember the number. But I couldn't seem to reach anyone. That bit sort of dissolved.
I felt bad that the hamsters had been so suddenly neglected and returned my attention to them. They seemed smaller now. Perhaps they weren't baby Syrians, but full-grown dwarves. This seemed to fit with the fact that the other two sitting on the bush branches were mottled normals, an exclusively dwarf hamster colouring.
When I woke up, I was worried that this was an indication that Snug and Snout, who both have diabetes and are mottled normals, will soon join Jane in the hereafter. I didn't make any sense of the black and white banded one. Perhaps Cordelia (their mother) is diabetic, too? It's certainly possible despite no signs yet. Or maybe she has some other problem?
But then as I typed the above just a moment ago, something else came to me: Snug and Snout's three siblings who died before their fur came in properly. Two of these would have been mottled normals, but Mike and I are convinced that the third was a mottled black with a white band like their mum. Plus the normals in the dream were more speckly than Snug or Snout, just like the ones that died.
It is good to think I have a garden somewhere where all my loves can live.
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