Be a proud dreamer...like me

I’ve been thinking about dreams. Not the type that jar us from sleep or the ones that can become a drag on our workday productivity. No, I’ve been thinking about those big, fill-up-the-horizon dreams, the change your routine forever dreams, the dreams that call out to all of us at one time or another, but which only the bravest (or foolhardiest) among us ever answer.

When I was a youngster, my mother used to call one of my cousins “a dreamer.” I could tell by her tone this was a pejorative assessment. One wasn’t supposed to dream, in her opinion. I was never able to discern why. To me, being “a dreamer” meant that, with life, the sky was the limit. Or maybe, since both my cousin and I were of the Star Trek generation, our dreams could take us into space, the final frontier. “To go where no man has gone before…”

This cousin of mine grew up, launched several business ventures, all of which failed, and married a domineering woman who, like my mother, didn’t put much stock in dreams. By age 30, my cousin was quite unhappy; his dreams had been thoroughly trampled. (His story takes a positive turn, though. The first wife dumped him and he later met and married a kind and patient woman who made room in her heart for both him and his dreams. They live happily somewhere in Arizona.)

I think all of us carry secreted dreams in our hearts and many of us nourish them quietly, out of the view of those persons in our lives who don’t understand the value of dreams. What happens when you feed a dream, though, is that it outgrows the interior space you’ve allotted. Then your dream gives you an ultimatum: it’s time to go public, it says, because if you don’t, I’ll bury you in regret. A nourished dream quickly becomes unwieldy, you see. It no longer calls out to you in soft urgings; it thumps its fist on the table and yells “enough!”

And so you go public … and you’re labeled “a dreamer.” Congratulations.

Let the good times roll...

You can dream, learn, study, plan, order, sketch, and generally believe that it's possible to grow grapes successfully in Blue Earth County Minnesota, but it doesn't become real, really REAL, until this gets dumped on the property.

I post this photograph knowing full well that the person who has volunteered to help erect our trellising system may now consider backing out. (We love you Tony!)