A Pride of Place

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The alarm clock rang at seven-thirty that morning, and its gentle chimes terminated a dream which Ford Jackson (awake now and reaching for a cigarette) found himself examining in a mood of pleasurable nostalgia. In the dream he had been driving along a winding road in a country he knew was France; chestnut trees marked like palominos whizzed by on either side of him, and the sunlight, breaking through nets of brilliant green leaves, danced about on the surface of the road like shiny new pennies. That was about all there had been in the dream, but he knew it was France because of the wind in his face, the calm, solitary countryside, and the chestnut trees posted like sentinels along the gray, winding road. There were no people in the dream.

Ford Jackson didn’t look for revelations in dreams, in fact he put no significance in them at all, but this one puzzled him slightly because he hadn’t particularly liked France the two times he had been there. It must have been dreaming about a fine sunny countryside that had put him in a good humor, he thought, as he pulled on his robe and walked barefooted across the thick wool carpeting to the windows on the east side of his bedroom. This was the third week of December and while there hadn’t been much snow in Darby County so far, or all of Pennsylvania for that matter, Ford Jackson was already restless for spring. He loved the look and texture of the countryside then, with Black Angus cattle standing in sharp relief against the rolling green meadows and the farm ponds shining like glass in the morning sun.

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