The dream always ends at that door.

In my dream I am no longer a nearly forty-year-old woman. I am a child again. I know that is so because the heavy iron pipes that form an enclosure for the school- yard are just above my eye level when I turn to look at them.

I see that the high school is closed. It is late afternoon on a warm summer day. The shadows are long. Every- thing is bathed in a reddish light from the fiery sun that is dropping down at the other end of Main Street where the railroad tracks block the west end of the street. Our house is set facing the sun at the east end of Main.

From the corner where I stand I can see the whole of Main Street, all the houses and stores on either side. And I can see our house.

The panes of glass in the facade of the old house are blankly red, reflecting the sunset. Nobody can see into those windows at this time of day, even if they should be standing on the porch of the house. But someone inside can see out. I know.

Yes, now I see what is strange. The school isn't the only place where there is no life. I can see. There are no cars, no people. Only the gleaming red windows up and down the street.

Mr. Berlin's filling station is closed, no one there. I move across to Ogilvie's garage. Ogilvie's garage was closed and vacated long before my family came to live in the little town. Even so, now I put my hands on each side of my face and peer into the garage windows, as I did so many times in my childhood. Dust, thick dust and two old cars, Chevrolets of the 1930s.

Then the Baptist Church. It looks as I remember it. The trees on the other side are moving gently in the faint summer breeze. The church looks friendly but the doors won't open at my tug. I can't get in.

Across and up the street a way is where my music teacher lives. In a town of private houses and one-story buildings, she lives in an upstairs apartment. The old, red brick building was abandoned during the Depression. It had been a hotel when the citizens had had grandiose plans for their oil boom town. Now the building stands gaunt and empty, except for Mrs. Warren. She carved out a kingdom for herself and her little daughter and her old parents. She had, by some strength of will power, made an apartment from a maze of those old abandoned hotel rooms. She must have been a squatter in the old building, keeping her family afloat on twenty-five cents an hour, when we music students could afford to pay her that. When we couldn't pay, she gave us lessons free.

It was there in that oddly shaped apartment that I first had