A Summer House

Night before last. January 12, 2012

I had a dream that I was going to the funeral of a distant cousin. The funeral was taking place somewhere near the East coast. We arrived at a huge Victorian style house that had all of these different rooms all added on to the original structure, so that it looked like it was twisting up and up into the sky. It was all painted an antique cream with ivy-green trim, and it glowed in the summer heat, bees lazily droning around the honeysuckle bushes that clustered around the windows. It smelled like magic. I went in to the house through one of the many doors on the left side of the house. The door I entered through was a sliding glass door with a screen. It entered on to a dining room with a long wooden dining table running through the center of it. The table had a long elegant legs that ended in lion paws, and a long, tapered, maroon embroidered runner was placed in the center of it. There were white porcelain plates trimmed with gold set around the table at each chair, and a floral center piece with cream flowers and a candle shielded in a a hurricane lamp. Along the back wall was an ornate mirror with wooden vines curling it's way around the edges placed above a caramel-colored sideboard.
At the left end of the dining room was a set of white french doors that opened on to a pale-blue sitting room filled with white wicker furniture with cushions in varying shades of medium to pale-blue. There were dozens of white lamps set out on little mahogany tables. There was a marble fireplace with little gold figurines clustered on top of the mantel in the wall to the right, and a veranda that looked out onto the summer garden on the left. Next to the fire place was a little winding stairway that I went up. I came upon a hallway that twisted and turned at uneven intervals and had doors that led into rooms in random places. I picked a door and opened it.
There were people milling around in this room, with handkerchiefs dabbing at wet eyes. Many of the women wore large hats and long summer-colored dresses, with white gloves, like I had taken a step back in time. This room didn't seem to have a specific purpose like the ones downstairs; it had lots of little furniture in it, child-sized furniture. There were little round foot-stools in ivory and dusty rose all over the place. And there was a small vanity, which seems very important because I focused on it for a long time, and began to fall in love with the little things that were scattered across it's surface. I crouched in front of the vanity, afraid to sit in the little chair, and looked at myself in the three-pane fold out mirror. I had my hair tied in an elegant bun at the back of my neck, and I wore a large straw hat with a magnolia flower in it. I had on a golden-yellow calf-length dress of a very light material with little white flowers all over, with a heart-shaped neckline trimmed in lace, and little capped sleeves with pearl buttons. I also wore white gloves that came just to my wrists and a long strand of cream-colored pearls.
On the vanity there was a little sliver hair-brush and a strand of pearls, and little glass jars of play make-up. I pulled off one of my gloves to gently run my fingers over the little silver hairbrush. It felt sad. It was then that I realized that I was at a child's funeral, and I cried because the child was so little.
Just then, a woman came up to me and said, "It is very sad. But they are thinking about adopting you. And you could come and live here."
I stand up. Something about this frightens me, even though I would love to live in this strange house filled with hundreds of rooms. I need to find my mom and my grandmother, but I can't remember how to get back downstairs. I feel my heart begin to race a little, fueled by panic. I go back out into the hallway, but I can't find the stairs down.
Then...
I wake up.