I’ve noted a slight change recently when I awake in the mornings.

My eyes are moist.

This morning, in a late dream, I had for some reason trekked across an unknown city to hide in a booth in a diner, only to discover that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were in a booth next to me, and Tom was loudly talking about a woman we both were familiar with. He was itemizing recent hardships in her life and also extolling her as a giving person, roused as he gets when impassioned. “I hope she gets what’s coming for her- in the best of ways”, he declared, and listening to his defense of her, I lay in the bend of my booth, emotions stirred.

I retrieved a page of infographics on a B-17 from a folder I for some reason had with me that I wanted to give him, and sitting up, I leaned over and explained it and offered it to him. “The Arrow!” he exclaimed, and he took it with that twinkle in his eye, and then I got up and left the diner.

And then I woke up.

I find myself waking up from drowsy disconnected dreams like these often of late. But what I retain about most of them is the mood they left me in, and the wet that sits on my eyes.

I am pretty sure this physical response is due, in some parts, to acclimation and adjustment.

When COVID came in 2019, the world froze, in anxiety and dread, as a plague began to destroy people. For several years, striving to protect our parents from the mystical flu, I and my sister took full-measures to keep the bug away from them. And despite our efforts, as the world was climbing out of the pandemic’s shadow, the illness found them. Soon my mom was in a hospital fighting for her life. For a week. And then weeks. Other diagnoses piled on, and as a family, we watched and waited. Recovering, she fell again- this time, physically, breaking a leg- and imperiling our hopes once more.

Finally, last year, she began to recover fully, and entering 2024, I was feeling hopeful and even inspired to make an effort to make myself better in 2024.

And then suddenly my cats- each one of them, simultaneously- began to decline, until, halfway into the year, all three of my longtime boarders were gone.

Here in New Mexico late in the summer, I usually awake to see clear blue skies over the city each morning. As the day progresses, near the skirt of the Sandia mountains, clouds will emerge from the blue. Water in dry air finds a cold zone against the rise of the range and crystallizes, creating white sprawls that collect late afternoon in the sky. Often, when the cool air and the hot air meet, after the water crystals have collected into those billowing white pads against the mountain, cottony tendrils fall from under some of these masses. Heat has warmed the frozen liquid in the clouds- and if we are lucky, the cottony tendrils convert into sheets of rain that wet the foothills below.

I suspect that, in some ways, I am in a similar place as those late afternoon clouds, in my late morning dreams that stir me with moist eyes.

I’ve held my breath for a long few years, and I suspect that much of that stress and sadness has sat in there, frozen, until I recently started trying to breathe normally again. Finally now exhaling, heat rises, and cold falls, and Tom Hanks raves about a mutual acquaintance, and within, the icy virga melts and becomes rain, and from my dreams I awake, feeling moisture on my eyelids before I get up and look out at a clear blue morning sky.