I kept forgetting to tell you

“Run me through that dream again,” Joyce said in a slow voice, looking directly at me.

So I repeated the story, which wasn’t much of a story. More a vignette or snapshot.

We’ve visited an outdoor place, some kind of hardly settled territory, like a backyard strewn with objects, and now we’re leaving. I show you what I have picked up: a broken sculpture of a duck. Polished wood, very dark – maybe walnut or mahogany, ornately carved. The head, neck, and the top part of the bird’s chest. I turn it over. On the bottom, amid the rough texture of the exposed grain, is embedded — a round rock! Larger than a golf ball, smaller than a baseball. The surface is dry, pitted, unremarkable. I recognize the rock as a geode.

“I wonder,” you say to me as the dream ends, “how did they get that?”

Joyce nodded, eyes wider, as if I had confirmed what she heard the first time.

“OK, listen to this,” she said. “On Friday when I walked Jackson, I decided to go to the duck pond because we haven’t been for a while. The pond was half-frozen, and the ducks were standing on the ice part. They had lost some feathers, which were stuck on the surface, kind of shuddering in the breeze. I was thinking, could I paint the scene? I want to. How would I capture it? I’ve been thinking about this ever since, and I kept forgetting to tell you.”

Joyce paused. I said to myself inwardly, huh, OK. She went to the duck pond and by coincidence I dreamed about a wooden duck, and my recital of the dream to her cued Joyce to describe what she saw at the pond. Onward.

She wasn’t finished. “That was Friday,” Joyce said. “On Saturday, when I went to pick up Leela from the playdate at her friend’s house, the mom told me the kids were in the backyard and they made a crystal garden. I was imagining a small field of glitter they had put together on the ground. But when I got there, I saw wooden poles in the ground and mounted on top of the poles, broken-open geodes. Crystals in the geodes.” Another pause. “The mom told me that her husband likes to work with wood. He made the poles. I’ve been thinking about this ever since, and I kept forgetting to tell you.”