Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a dream and reality.

My granny was a real “hard” dreamer. She couldn’t decide if she’d dreamed something or if it really happened. I’m kind of like that.

There are places that reoccur so often in my dreams that they are as familiar to me as places in my own hometown. Some things that happen in my dreams are so vivid I’m not sure if I dreamed them or they really happened.

“It’s just your age,” I’ve been told.

Well, I’m tired of hearing that. Everything that happens to me these days “because of your age.” Well, I don’t dream one bit more now than I did when I was a spring chicken. I just share more things.

Sometimes the sharing is out of necessity and to keep me from being hauled off to Tuscaloosa – the institution, not the college town.

Just recently, I was on the way home from work on Friday afternoon and suddenly remembered that Mernie had told me I was supposed to meet a lady at the IGA/Piggly Wiggly to do an interview at 7 o’clock Saturday morning.

I couldn’t remember the lady’s name or what the interview was about. I was not the weekend reporter and I didn’t want to have to get up and get dressed for an interview at sunup on Saturday.

I decided I just wouldn’t go.

But the Jiminy Cricket in me kept rubbing its legs together, chirping and chirping, and kept me awake half the night. I tossed and turned knowing that I ought to get up and go. I finally wore myself out and fell into a deep sleep.

The rooster’s crowing woke me at 8 o’clock. I’d over slept. I’d left that poor ol’ soul standing and waiting at the IGA/Piggly Wiggly for an hour. I sort of felt bad but really relieved because I had the whole day to do housework that had gone undone all week.

I went straight to my chores. I didn’t even take off my gown. I climbed in the empty bathtub with a scrub brush and went after the tiles like fighting fire. Ajax was flying everywhere– in my hair, which was standing on ends, and speckling my face, my arms and my blue, cotton gown.

Suddenly, the bathroom door flung open. In hurried a young woman I had never seen in my life. She stood there looking at me, standing barefooted and flatfooted in the bathtub in my gown and covered in cleansing powder.

Anger rose in me like a brush fire. Just because I didn’t show up for the interview, she had come to my house and into my bathroom. And she was standing there looking at me like I was a runaway from the loony bin.

“Who are you and what do you want?” I said in the most irritated voice I could muster under the circumstances.

About that time, my daughter squawked, “Mama? What are you doing in the bathtub? In your gown?”

Obviously, she had never scrubbed the bathroom tile or she would not have asked that question.

Well, it all came out in the wash, so to speak.

The young woman was a friend of my daughter’s who was on the way to the beach and had stopped to pay an emergency visit to the bathroom. My daughter thought I was at the IGA/Piggly Wiggly doing the interview. So she and the young woman were quite surprised to see me in the bathtub in my gown and frothing at the mouth.

I made my apologies and cheese toast and grits as a peace offering. I’m sure that young woman will seek a port-a-potty or a bush before she makes a stop at our house again.

Back at work on Monday, I asked Mernie who the woman was that I was supposed to interview on Saturday.

“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t tell you anything like that.”

“Well, I guess I dreamed it then,” I said. “But I was so absolutely sure. At least, no poor ol’ soul wasn’t left waiting and wondering.

And, I felt pretty good about it. After all, I got the last laugh on my daughter.

When my children were growing up, our house was quite large and you could be in one part and never know who was in the other. One rule around the house was that they never, ever let anybody in the house they didn’t know.

One afternoon, I got out of the shower and walked into the den in my brassier and half slip and came face to face with a strange man sitting on the sofa. I squealed and covered as much as I could cover by crossing my arms over my chest and fled the scene leaving my four-year-old daughter alone with the strange man.

When I came back, he had fled.

I admonished my daughter, “I have told you time and time again to never let anybody that you don’t know in the house.

“It was ‘the minister,’ Mama.”

That night, “the minister” had the program at our church.

In addition to his ministerial duties, he was a door-to-door children’s Bible salesman. He was also an illustrator who used his talent to enhance his presentations.

I kept my head down the whole time, hoping he wouldn’t recognize me and my “illustration.”

And, I didn’t hear a word the minister said.