Row Row Row or My God, Ain't That Pitiful

Last nite I dreamed of the neighborhood that I grew up in.  The landscape had become that of a tranquil mountainous cemetery, quite rural.  Not only was it raining, the deep valleys and even to the high hills were flooded.  Coffins were afloat.

The flowing surrealistic serenity of the scene had drowned my mind with the nostalgia of childhood places, such as my grandmother's house.  There I sat on a moody dark brown speckled carpet manufactured somewhere near the middle of the Twentieth Century.  There too, in that past time, outside of my grandmother's house, it was raining.  I was sitting in a dark corner with my grandmother milling about in the other three-fourths of her humble apartment.  She was frying okra.

Later in life I learned that where I sat, underneath the flooring, was a forgotten water well.  A church member, most spiritual Kathy, said that she dreamed of dead animals flowing out from that well.  I don't know who told her there was a well hidden underneath that apartment.

As I came out from my vision of the past and back into the reality of my dream, I waded through waist-high water, which had called forth the dead from their burial grounds.  Where my grandmother's apartment had sat, only the crest of a hill remained above water.

I am very tired.  The rain seems perpetual.  The water grows deeper.  I grab hold of an ancient rotted casket that is floating downstream.  It's lid is partially hanging at a disturbing angle from what is a single rusted hinge.  It seems to me that it looks as if the inhabitant had burst forth, enrapt at his unexpected reemergence into the land of the Living.

I pull myself up into the corrupted wooden vessel, its strange stale odorousness reinvigorated by saturation.  I slowly float downstream, animate amongst the cadaverous bobbing inanimate.  I am now pulled by the slow steady current, resigned of endeavor.  I float from what was Reed Street into the South East, from the Necropolis of Biltmore towards the sunken Shiloh.

In the distance, long ago where a chain-link fence stood, my uncle Boydis standing in a high and swamped grass.  He is waving his arms as an sightless rotted idiot thing floats inbetween us and onto a small disappearing peninsula.  It is a bluish orange twilight, and I think that the well is still there, its forgotten contents being purged forth into the Overworld.

Since I dreamt this dream and wrote it down, many years have passed.  My uncle Boyd has passed.  I dream of him often, and the same landscape.  Many people that grew up in the area atop Summit Street have told me that even though they have not lived there for decades, they often dream of it.  The well is real.  Before I was in this world my uncle built a swimming pool by the well.  Some time later my uncle built my grandmother's apartment atop the swimming pool and well.

I believe that should I research the historicity of the 227 Summit, I shall find that a dowser dug a well for the community's use.  I believe someone in that early Ashevillian community sacrificed dogs, cats, and whatever they might find to the lady of the well.  I am glad that I am not a tenant in my grandmother's apartment.  It haunts me.