I am between the house and my garden in Auburn. A box truck has pulled into the driveway to either deliver or pick up produce, I am not sure which. Someone has prohibited me from going into the garden but has permitted a little boy with dark hair to go into the garden instead. Somehow he slips through the mesh of the fence into the garden to pick zucchini. I am angry about that because he will picked the wrong ones but there is nothing I can do about it. Feeling extremely frustrated, I turned to go enter the house. There is no one to whom he can voice my anger; whoever is in charge is not available or accessible and I have no way to remedy my situation. There is something I can do though, I realize. I can write about my experience in my journal, and that way I can at least create something out of it.
As I walk towards the house I pass a corner of the garden. A zucchini bush and some beets are growing there, both lush and thriving. I reflect that it must have been a wet summer, then I notice that one of the zucchinis growing on the bush is all moldy towards the tip, perhaps due to the wet weather.

Talking about this dream with Darchelle, we puzzled over the significance of my not being allowed into my own garden and the symbolism of the little boy without coming to any clear conclusions. Later, in writing this up, I noticed how my feeling of frustration sits at the center of the dream, flanked on one side by my garden and on the other by my journal. That frustration felt familiar in character but not in its intensity. It is something I experience every day, an unavoidable aspect of daily life. Instead of activity, I sit, and instead of initiative, I wait, and the bedrock of my emotional landscape is frustration. The key to coping with it has been to adjust my expectations to accommodate my disability. By expecting to sit and do nothing, anticipating being unable to do anything for myself, I temper the frustration that my situation would otherwise engender.
The dream highlights a fundamental similarity between my gardening and my journaling. My garden was a product of my strength and my creativity, a place of work and pleasure where my physical effort and skill yielded tangible (and tasty) fruit. In it I was entirely free to work in my own way without any oversight or assistance from anyone else. If I wanted to plant corn I planted corn. If I wanted to let the kale go to seed, the kale went to seed, and in the spring I harvested a carpet of baby kale greens. It may have looked unkempt but in my own eyes it was beautiful. Journaling is likewise an activity which I do in my own way for my own pleasure. I use obsolete technology to combine photos and text into something which I enjoy and regard as beautiful. No one else tells me what to write and no one else can judge the quality of the result. As with gardening, I control both the process and the product but unlike gardening, journaling is something I can still do.
Being denied access to and control over my garden is an obvious symbol of how ALS limits me from participating in activities which I have loved. The arrival of the box truck may represent its onset, while I still lived in Auburn. Has the truck come to give or to take away? Clearly ALS has taken away much of my life, but on the other hand it has given me much as well. I have been healed emotionally even as I have been disabled physically. I can do little of what I used to do, and even that (birding for instance) I cannot do the right way. That may be the significance of the little boy, who creeps through the fence rather than entering through the gate. He is doing what I would have done, but not in the way I would have done it. His dark hair may represent Darchelle's role in my life, enabling me to continue to do some of the things I formerly did, even if we cannot do them together exactly in the way I would have done them on my own.