Do you ever return the same place in dreams?

 

I do.

 

In my dreams I'm seven again, barefoot and fleeting, feet thudding softly on a wide, moss-covered path that winds like a green ribbon through the woods. The moss is thick and springy beneath my heels, cool and wet from recent rain. Wildflowers nod along the edges of the path, and I know them all by name: harebells, stitchwort, buttercups. Insects hum in the long grasses, intent with drowsy purpose. Birds flit between branches, and I call out their names as I run: wren, chiffchaff, sparrow. There is no time there. Only the path behind, the path ahead, curving like memory toward something I love.

 

But just before I get there, I wake up.

 

At first it was a fancy - a trick of the mind that I laughed at over morning coffee. But in time the dream grew bittersweet - the sense of something denied.

 

Eventually I took the bait. Dropped the kids off with my parents, packed boots and walking socks, and returned. To the place where I had spent those barefoot years. To the place where that path might still wait for me.

 

Even the drive felt like slipping through time. As if the mountain pass was a crossing, between this world and another. I turned up the radio, sang along, convinced I was coming home.

 

But the village is not quite right.

 

The roads are all paved now, smooth and wide, reflective white lines under too-bright lights. Electric fences crackle along once-open fields, with signs pointing to prescribed pathways, keeping the wild things in line. The old village shop is boarded up now, its blue door faded and blistered, the hand-painted sign advertising fresh eggs replaced with a “land for sale”.I strap on my boots nonetheless, wandering the lanes on a quest for a whiff of warm hay or the sound of a swarm. All those little things that had made summers seem so stretched out and endless. But now everything feels muffled, constrained. Like a familiar face behind frosted glass.

 

The path eludes me for days, and I begin to think it’s been fenced off, deforested or developed. The whole journey feels absurd to me now, foolhardy and sentimental. I go for gloomy walks in the foothills and sit alone in the pub, scowling at the flashing lights of a new-fangled fruit machine.

​

On the last morning I rise early, with the mist still clinging low and soft to the old-man’s-beard-rich hedgerows. As I edge around a sheep field, I notice a tangle of ivy and clematis hiding an old dry-stone wall. Something stirs behind my ribs. I brush the foliage aside and slip through a gap in the stones, boots crunching on the broken earth: and there it is.

​

The mossy path.

​

At least I think it is. It’s smaller now. Narrower, slightly overgrown, as if unsure of itself. And I am bigger, of course, grown up, and just as unsure of myself. All at once I’m consumed by the fear that the dream was just rose-tinted vision. That rewalking this path can only let down expectations built up over years.

​

With a sigh I sit on the low wall, unlace my boots and kick them off. Ball up my brand new walking socks, and step barefoot onto the path.

​

The moss receives me like a carpet, yielding under each step, damp and spongy and petrichor-scented. The arches of my feet ache with unnamed relief, and like a long exhale I let them sink in. My soles remember what my mind cannot. With each careful step, the present loosens its grip. Memories rise like mist.

​

The sound of wool skirts brushing bracken as I trailed along after my grandma, giggling and throwing goose grass at the tidy tartan folds. Her voice, low and round, naming birds and beetles as we walked. The woven willow basket she carried over one arm, full of flowers for dyeing, or clumps of wool caught on gorse.

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I walk deeper. The trees part, the air sweetens, and suddenly I know what’s to come:

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At the end of the path, the meadow unfolds.

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Exactly as I left it, or as it waited to be found: a great, sunlit bowl of wildflowers, their heads nodding in recognition. Cornflowers, poppies, yarrow, foxglove. Grass up to my knees, green-gold and silvered with dew. A place made not of now or then, but of touch and scent and silence.

​

I run barefoot, full of wonder, not childlike, but a wonder hard-fought-for and won. The moss gives way to soft wild grass, cool and slick with the morning. Bees veer lazily from my path.

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And this time, I don’t wake up.