It was a dark and stormy night ...

My dream stream has dried up ... I still dream but can't remember the details any more.

Last night I wrote down "pills" and this morning it meant absolutely nothing to me.

I was up a couple of times in the night. It was very noisy in my bedroom so I closed the window to shut out the racket of the stream. The noise continued. I checked other windows to stop the wind. No windows were open. Then it dawned on me — rain — on a tin roof. You know all those romantic notions about how you will drowse off listening to the rain on the tin? Well, rain being driven full force out of the sky is more alarming than sleep-inducing, especially when you live in a house that has already suffered from weather.

Before the house was built; when its foundation had been poured and construction just begun, I was staying at the cottage below the house. One night a giant storm blew in. It dumped tropical storm quantities of water on us. Sand and gravel from the road and the building site were swept down to the cottage and into the lake. I went outside with a flashlight and tried to see what was happening, but I could only get enough of a picture to banish sleep for the rest of the night. At first light I was outside taking inventory.

The cottage's kitchen door was blocked by sand and the recycling box covered.

The hill above the cottage was gashed open by the water flow. Three fissures wide enough to accommodate motorcycles scarred the earth.

The house foundation the day before had been invisible beneath tons of construction sand. Now one corner jutted out, obscenely naked, from a cavernous hole and a muddy stream bed leading to the lake via the cottage.

I felt sick.

We built a huge (and very beautiful) retaining wall above the new house to prevent the mountain and the road from ending up in the house. Then we created a second retaining wall down from the house to the cottage. And we placed rocks strategically to trick the next storm's deluge to go into the stream bed rather than overland. I say "we" ... but of course it was really Eric and his crew and their massive rock and earth moving machines that did the work. I planted clover and paid the bills.

I haven't been outside yet this morning to see if the barriers and tricks worked, but my first observations from the windows are reassuring.

As long as this house is vulnerable, so am I. When it is truly finished and secure, I will feel safe enough to be lulled back to sleep by rain on a tin roof, and maybe then, the dream stream will begin to flow again.