I know I must be close.

For as long as I could remember, the disturbing dream returned every few months. I may have been six or nine or twelve when I first had the nighttime visions. I am not quite sure. All I know is that it haunted my sleep from time to time until one day it disappeared…

I never attempted to approach my childhood home from the west. I was always approaching from the east…and there was always an obstacle that prevented me from finding my way home. A train making its way down the tracks, the creek, bullies, strangers in cars enticing me with candy. Sometimes I could see my house, but I was never able to enter the large front yard with the looped driveway, much less open the familiar front door. So close, yet so far away, they say.

I woke up smiling the morning after I finally made it home past the speeding train and the flooding creek, all the way to the open arms of my immediate family, which had grown larger than it had been when I first had the dream so many years before. In reality, of course, my parents had not lived in that house for close to fifteen years. I believed the dream had met its conclusion because I had found answers to questions I had been asking myself for many years.

A full year went by…and then another. About a year ago, when some of the answers became a bit blurred, the dream returned and all the progress I had thought I had made seemed to have been lost. I knew answers needed to be clarified and some changes made.

Alas, the recurring nightmare came to visit me again last night. But I felt some relief, knowing that I must be close to being back in my comfort zone.