Words for Wednesday is a weekly meme with words or picture prompts given Bloggers are encouraged to make what they can of them.

This month (October) Cindi is providing the prompts

This is how I used the ones for this week

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Tom and Tim 6 – Tom makes a decision.

Tim suggested it and for once Tom agreed with him. Friends had also cautiously mentioned it to him. He realised he couldn’t hide from the truth any longer. Now was the time for him to accept the fact that he needed to pluck up the courage and seek some sort of grief counselling.

He blamed it on the dream. He had a vague idea but really couldn’t understand what had caused the recurrence of a dream he’d had years ago.

It was a pleasant dream – definitely not like the nightmares he’d had as a child.

They occurred when his father had continually threatened him with the belt if one of them left a gate open or a tap running. Living on a property dependent on rain, a bore or heavens forbid a truck to deliver their water supply was difficult. He envied his school friends, the children who lived in town, being able to play with a garden hose on a hot day.  Where he lived humans and stock were far more important.

As children the twins had listened to their mother recalling the nightmares she suffered after she discovered they had dug tunnels  near the sand quarry. She suffered from asthma and he could remember her huskily recounting the terrible visions she had seen in her dreams, visions of Tim messing about, being a bit of a clown causing the tunnels to collapse around them both.

After watching a rerun of ‘The Red Balloon’ Tom and Vera decided to make the trip to Paris for their honeymoon. She wanted to experience the sights she’d seen in the film, quite sure she would see children walking the streets holding those famous red and blue balloons. He had been so proud of his ‘vision of loveliness’ conquering her fear of flying. They drove to the airport on a cool misty morning, water dripping off the pine trees that lined the property’s driveway and it had certainly taken a great deal of courage for her to board the aircraft.

The dream first occurred not long after they arrived home.

In it he gazed off into the horizon watching red balloons floating away above a forest of pine trees shrouded in mist. At the time it was a beautiful reminder of that happy event.

He hadn’t experienced it again until this past week – uncannily, it was similar to the picture he saw in the travel section of the paper. The one that had him weeping uncontrollably, unable to hide his tears, when Tim arrived that morning.

Previous episodes – Tom And Tim 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5