Somewhere in Montana

After we caught the Boston Strangler, I was walking down the country road and saw the bison.  They were silvery colored with flecks of glitter in their shaggy coats grazing peacefully on the lawn of the convent.  A young nun, dressed all in white from her high necked collar to her button down shoes was giving one of the juveniles a bath on a brick walkway in front of pair after pair of double glass doors.

What a lovely picture that would make, I thought to myself and then remembered that my camera was in my car so I hurried to go get it but by then the other nuns had finished stringing the barb wire fence and were scattered across the open pasture, manually cutting hay and singing in a language I didn’t know, and I had to walk an extra mile. It was dusty and hot and before long I heard F. Lee Bailey explaining his defense of Albert DeSalvo and then I was awake and on the television, F. Lee Bailey really was explaining his defense of Albert DeSalvo.

I almost never have dreams that are more than a fragment of two of something that makes absolutely no sense and even less often do I remember them for more than a minute after I wake up.  This was out of the ordinary.

The Strangler explains itself since a documentary was playing.

I’d recently been working on a story about an encounter with a priest.  Nuns weren’t part of it but, I decided, the connection was close enough.

I watch numerous wildlife videos on social media and that very day had seen one about a massive herd of elk jumping over a barb wire fence to cross a dusty two lane road somewhere in Montana or Utah, I couldn’t remember which.  It might even have been Idaho but it was most definitely somewhere I had never been.

A snippet of this, a smidgen of that.  Let sit overnight, sprinkle with reality.

And you have a dream.