I had flown home to Virginia. My mother, brother John, and Uncle Joe were in the car, which was now without explanation, a soft-top Land Rover Defender. I was sitting in the back as we made out way down Bishop Road to the junction with Coal Bank Hollow, the road to Brush Mountain, where we live.
It was afternoon in late spring. New leaves were on all the trees, with that yellow-green color that the new leaf has, the chlorophyll having not yet cured into that deep dark green of summer. In the low angle light of the setting sun, the trees were glowing green gold. It was as if they were fiber-optic, taking up the light of the sun. In the dream, a huge surge of emotion came over me. I became aware that my memory of the mountain where I grew up was perfect, that despite the fact that I had lived in North Carolina for 10 years, and now lived in California, that my memory had supernatural fidelity, and that on my deathbed, I could pull up this image from deep storage and see the mountain perfect and irradiated with the living light of the sun.
I started to cry. I got a lump in my throat, eyes puffed up. It was really that beautiful - I was in a kind of religious rapture. It was joy and loss at the same time, a fear that this was lost to me some how. I told myself that I needed to get control of how I was emoting. I remembered Uncle Joe in the front seat (left hand front, as the Defender had English controls). I recalled that he had not even cried at Granny's funeral (his own mother, and my maternal grandmother). He was a big ex-marine, a big man with a heart of gold, and I didn't want to have to explain what was happening inside me. The joy I felt rose to a high pitch as I looked out over the hills, thick with trees, bursting with the force of new life, and that was it.