Sonata in E Minor
Isobel
Our sense of reality is, for each of us, an understanding that is composed through lenses created in our linear life experiences and emotional affect in the moments our rational mind and the voice of our hearts meet in one agreement. We may rationally understand that no two humans may interpret "reality" in a shared experience the same way; however, we often find ourselves perplexed at the discord in "understanding" of a reality that we share with another person. Through Isobel's linear and emotional life, we walk into a conversation between our minds and hearts, and between linear events and our heart's response to love, life, and loss. For Isobel, life is as much about the human connection to the musicians who frequent her New England bed and breakfast as the connection to the music that fills the spaces of her home. For Isobel, reality is a woven fabric of love in music, music in time, and time in love.
They say my mind is normal again. My doctor has said I can resume my châtelaine duties. My fractured memory can handle the day-to-day details, he says. I can run my New England bed-and-breakfast if I take it easy, he says. Am I normal again? I'm not sure. I only know I dream a lot. When I sleep, I dream. When I'm awake, I remember. But is it memory or a haunting dream? Is it only a dream? A waking dream? I cannot tell. You see, I remember... No, no, no. NOT "remember." I DREAM of Ivan.
First Movement — Lento
In my dream, golden maples languidly drop their golden leaves, a soft shimmering rain of leaves lighting a cold grey sky. Each golden raindrop swoops in fitful waltz-time dips, closer and closer to the ground, then lies there, resting, nestling among the others. One-and-two-and-three — rest, rest, rest.
The maples are losing their dead hair. By winter they will be bald.
No, no! Not yet!! Buxom and round-bellied I am in my dream, waist lost in flabby softness of middle age. But my red-gold hair frowsily abundant, is not dead like the leaves. Not yet!
I watch the grey sky and golden the maples, my heart filled with their approaching nakedness, and wait.
Not a long wait. A station wagon sweeps con brio, up the circular driveway, the way Jon's car always approaches in my dreams. It stops, bursting with humans like a giant tick swollen with blood. Macrophages and corpuscles explode from the shell, then stretch to uncoil their lean, tall bodies: Jon and Suzanne, and four strange young men. One of them is Ivan.