Andrew awoke after having the strangest dream. Before he opened his eyes, he sought to ground himself in the memories of the day before reviewing the disturbing content of the dream itself. The dream had been so incredibly detailed and complex that he could hardly distinguish between his actual memories and the dream. Somehow the dream had blended with the memories of the day before until they seemed like a seamless sequence of events. He remembered having a conversation over the three-foot-tall, steel-wired cyclone back fence with his neighbor Allie about washing techniques. Andrew had just finished mowing his small backyard and his neighbor was hanging up her wash on the line when he asked her why she didn’t get a dryer instead of hanging out the wash. Allie had replied that she had a dryer, but that drying the clothes in the Sun gave them a fresh scent that no dryer could possibly match. Allie told him conversationally as she pinned her blouses to the steel line that the Wind and the Sun gave clothes a clean smell that no dryer could ever possibly match. Allie noted a little sadly that sun drying was especially important for baby clothes. She added in a maternal aside that her mother had told her when she was a little girl that the only way to dry a cloth diaper perfectly was to hang a freshly washed diaper in the breeze and let the Sun sterilize it. Allie smiled in remembered disappointment and said that the knowledge that her mother had passed on to her might never be of use to her, but she wanted Andrew to know in case he became a father someday. She shook her head as she continued to pin her blouses and underwear to the line with clothespins.
As she worked, she told him that she only used the dryer on rainy days when she had no choice and that on a perfect Spring day like that day, there was no reason not to take advantage of the Sun and breeze. He had told her that Spring had only brought him his annual sinus condition and had instantly loosed a violent sneeze as if to make his point. Upon hearing Andrew’s loud nasal eruption, Allie stopped what she was doing and had come over to the fence to suggest to him in a maternal way that perhaps if he took a nice hot bath maybe the steam would open his sinuses so that he’d feel better. Andrew had agreed to take her advice, telling her he was planning to take a nice long bath that night.
Andrew really liked his neighbor and was very attracted to her slim build that her tight fitting jeans displayed so well. Her ample bosom was contained neatly within the white ruffled blouse that she wore that morning, giving him a slight tingle of sexual titillation as he watched them bob up and down in response to her bending and straightening as she hung the clothes on the line. He remembered wishing that she was closer to his age so he could ask her out, but the gulf of five years made him feel like she was more his mother than a possible girlfriend. Rather than run the risk of embarrassing himself by asking her out, he had long ago decided to have her his confidant rather than his girlfriend.
Once the decision had been made, they had quickly become casual friends, occasionally grocery shopping together so she could teach him how to select ripe produce and help him learn the rudiments of cooking. In return, he would check the oil, water and transmission fluids on her car, even though she was perfectly capable of doing it for herself. Actually, Allie was completely self-contained. After her ill-fated marriage at eighteen which endured a stormy three years, but seemed to last an aeon , she was perfectly content to stay single. Her parents had died in the same year of her divorce, leaving her a huge trust fund which would easily support her for the rest of her life. Rather than spend the money frivolously, she elected to live a simple life in a small home which she owned outright, volunteering her free time to help at the neighborhood Daycare center for the poor.