Ran into an old friend in a dream Friday night. Haven't seen him since my late teens. He is the kind of guy that shows up too often in thoughts and dreams, as if the remembrance of him is a metaphor of some sort. He looked troubled in the dream and not able to gather the fragments of his life between when we lost touch in our teens and Friday night. Old and tired, he spoke a forgotten phrase, a dream words that never copy to the page quite right.

I replied something in the nature of, 'It will be OK', again in dreamspeak, where a single word can expand to near infinity.

He calmed, faded, then disappeared. I woke up to a new feeling that with a bit of sorting, all might be OK.

Peter the squirrel woke up more peaceful than he had been in a long time. He slowly fell out of the night's last dream, some concoction from his imaginings of Scandinavia and its fauna. He untangled himself from his pet wolf, sat on the side of the bed and bathed in the cool-orange glow of his den.

No yesterday, no tomorrow.

His withered paw did not bother him as it usually does in the morning. It was there, but it did not seem to matter that much, so pleasant was his mood.

There is a rift under my workshop desk which I call the Trader. I do not know if it has shape and form, as I have never actually seen it. I am only aware of its existence through its effect on small solid objects that are accidentally dropped near it. Often, when I drop an jewelry piece under my desk, it disappears -- hours of searching will not reveal its whereabouts -- fallen through the rift into to some Other Place.

This is not the most inexplicable behavior of the rift, as it could easily be argued that I am just terrible at finding lost items. There is a stranger behavior that I attribute to the rift which I think happens too often to be coincidence. When Trader accepts a new 'offering', it then redeposits a long lost piece dropped under the desk in exchange, often placing it in the most obvious, front and center, easy to find location. The rediscovered item is usually a years-ago dropped jewelry item that I searched for in vain before accepting it was probably gone forever.

I have crawled under the large bench many times in search of unfinished pieces of jewelry or tools. The rift has never accepted me as an offering, at least not that I have noticed. Maybe it takes time to recharge, having too recently gobbled up a half-finished ring or other trinket? If the Trader is large enough for a person to fit into or through, I think I would like to visit the Land of Lost Items. If I was accepted, I wonder what it would replace me with? And with what might I be redeemed?