white heron, red herring

Last night, in all of the five hours of sleep I managed before my seven a.m. American Lit final, I dreamt of Sarah Orne Jewett's little Sylvy in her short story A White Heron. The June sun filtered through dark pine boughs at the close of another summer day, the girl's bare feet maneuvered the shadowy trail in expert confidence. She searched for Mistress Mooly, the stubborn old cow hiding away in the huckleberry bushes. I watched the tale quietly, a shadow behind the adventure---occasionally analyzing the situation as Dr. Matthews would have us do, intent on catching supreme moments of regional realism and the borderlines of a domestic sphere. And, as one is wont to do on nights marking the hours before a big event, I woke frequently at intervals, checking my clock in the blind panic that I'd miss my exam. And every time I'd open my eyes with the same name beating alongside my heart: Sarah Orne Jewett. Sarah Orne Jewett.

One would think that could be a clear sign of things to come in the morning and, being somewhat susceptible to the symbolic, I made sure to run through my notes on that particular text again, scanning my interpretation of Sylvy's enlightenment. I got up earlier than planned, giving into the relentless murmurings before packing my bag for the day and heading to campus in the early morning chill.

And the White Heron, after all its promise, continued to elude both Sylvy's hunter and my test-taking self. It was basically the only text of our semester-long reading that didn't make it on the exam.

Moral of This Story: dreams are just dreams (which knowledge happened to prove useful for my final essay on the American Dream, so all is not lost).