Suitcase Full of Flowers

I do not know why I cannot sleep without my old school over the ear headphones on, snuggled in a blanket with the heat on and the window open as the cold air hits my face and the heat envelopes me. I also cannot fall asleep without the sounds of the rain beaming through these headphones to calm me as I sleep. The last four days have been very rough for me. I’ve switched careers which was about the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever done. With constant thoughts of if I was cut out to work in the health care field and I can’t even stand the sight of blood but I want to help. I know that I am an artist at heart, from the tip of my toes to the crown of my skull I was meant for so much more than this. Yes I want to help but is losing myself worth it. I started having the worst dreams four days ago and I was for sure it had everything to do with my career choices.

Four days ago I laid out my scrubs after I took a shower and started my routine of setting up what I like to call my fortress of solitude. I drifted into sleep so easily it was as if I was hypnotized, I felt sleep come over me so heavily I began to wonder if I had taken a sleeping pill but I knew that I hadn’t. I can’t tell you what I was dreaming about, but I can tell you how I was awakened. My mother’s voice screaming my name is if she was being attacked. I jolted up, and as I reached for my headphones to pull them off of my ears I began to look around. Slowly realizing I was alone in the darkness, I jumped out of bed and reached over quickly to turn on my bed side table lamp. I came to the realization that my mother wasn’t there, she could not have been, and she had died 10 years ago from bone cancer. But…How could I have heard her so clearly? So haunting? So powerful? Powerful enough for me to be so confused that I could not get back to sleep. It was 3:34 in the morning, and I had to be up at 6 am.

3 Days ago I decided that I wouldn’t sleep and managed to make it until 5 am before I fell asleep and was quickly awakened by my 6 am alarm. Walking in to work felt like walking into hell, it was the last place I wanted to be, but here I was doing my rounds as the head nurse in the ICU ward. I sat down at the nurse’s station and the feeling came over me again, so familiar just like the other night. I had fallen asleep at the nurse’s station. My mother was there, at the nurses station staring right at me as I looked around to see if anyone else could see her, as her brown skin glistened with a light so iridescent she was all the colors of the rainbow but there she was my mommy. Oh how I missed her, as I reached out to touch her hand she raised her finger to her lips and to tell me to keep quiet. She didn’t open her mouth to say a word but I could hear her speaking to me. She said, “Hi my sweet girl, mommy missed you, but I’ve been watching and I see you finally listened to me, a nurse is a great choice. But sweet girl it’s not what you want, look for the book”. So confused I asked her what book. The next thing I heard was “Remini Lane Flowers!” The attending physician had awakened me and asked me to go home and get some rest.

My father and I were pretty close and I told him about what had been happening the last few days. He told me that he was taught that dreams meant the opposite when you are young, I told him mom asked me to look for a book, asked him what the opposite of that would be, and he said there is no opposite. He said that only older people in our family had the gift of receiving messages in a dream and I was only 27 and that meant I had not gained the power of sight. Or at least that’s what my dad thought.

It was time to go to sleep once more and I decided I needed to take the next few days off of work, since it was Friday I’d rather have a full weekend and handle whatever the hell was going on inside my mind. I was eager to fall asleep to see my mother once again, and the feeling came over me just like in the ICU I knew what was about to happen I was going to see my mother. But when I opened my eyes into this dream land I saw a man, it was a man I had seen only in pictures. His skin was the color of bronze and his eyes were like puddles of water if they were made from the purest virgin oceans. He was hiding something small in his hand and running away from what looked like slave masters. He was running through a field and ran past a sign that said Journey Road. Whatever he was carrying dropped and as he picked it up I could see it, a little black book. He picked it up and dusted the dirt from the road off of it and put it in his shirt pocket and held his chest. He ran a bit until he lost the slave masters. He ran into this shed that was broken down and hid the book under a floor board.

I jolted up out of my sleep once more, the book, could this be what mama was telling me to look for. All I could do was grab my phone and search up Journey Road and 22 locations popped up. I tore through the house looking for the man in the picture and on the back the name Ellis Flowers 1892 Moody, Alabama was handwritten in script. Sure enough 1 out of the 22 Journey Roads was in Moody, Alabama. I had planning to do, my mother sent me this for a reason and I was going to figure it out. As I packed a bag and booked a flight from Chicago to Alabama I felt everything but sane. I could not believe I was going across the country to look for a little black book.

I called my dad before boarding the plan, and he assured me that my mother’s family did plant roots in Moody after they were freed from slavery but was unsure if they were slaves. He also didn’t like the fact that I was flying across country because of a dream I had. When I googled Journey Road in Moody Alabama a museum came up and I thought there were be no better way to learn of my family history than to see if they were a part of Moody’s history. When I arrived at the museum it seemed so familiar it was nothing but an old home, a woman came up to me and asked me if I needed any help. I told her that I was looking into my family history because if I had told her what I was really doing there I could just imaging being carted off to a mental institution. She showed me to the Flowers exhibit and that was the first time I saw my name on something that didn’t have anything to do with roses and tulips. I began to look around and right on the wall in a corner enveloped by light the same iridescent light that enveloped my mother in my dream was a 3 foot painting of Ellis Flowers and below this painting was a book that was encased, it was small, leather, and black. For it to be in such an encasement there were no alarms that went off when I quickly rose the glass and grabbed the book. The woman came over to check and saw me with the book in my hands but it was too late I had begun to open it and right on the front inseam was my name. I grabbed my phone and took a picture, the one and only page that was written on had 5 numbers on it.

It was as if a light in my brain had switched the numbers began to illuminate in the air beautiful and blue, and no one saw it but me. I instantly knew what it was, it was a map, ordinance that my mother had taught me how to read as a girl. She called it our version of Morris code. The lady at the museum told me that this book was found under these very floor boards. I was so mesmerized by the numbers that I ran to my car to think. I stayed in my car until the museum closed and snuck into the backyard of the museum and followed the directions. See this was small quarter map, meaning it was in a small space and they were always kept where they wanted something to be found. As soon as I stepped into the yard I started counting my steps, the number of steps for each number after the first. The first number was 5 which meant buried, the second number was 7 which meant behind, the third was 10 which meant to take 10 steps to the left as soon as I was behind the house, next was 15 which meant to go straight 15 steps, and the last was 3 feet deep. I dug with my hands as fast as I could, I was lucky it had rained the night before and the ground was soft. I hit a suitcase, inside the suitcase was all this cash. It had to have been $20,000 dollars or more. On top of the cash was a note, it read “With the gift of sight, simplicity just won’t due, write what you see and make it a fantasy” There was no explanation of the money, which I reported by the way. I was told that because I found it on my property it was mine. I looked confused and said it’s not my property. The municipal clerk stated that the deed is in my name and has been for the last 10 years. All I could think have was my mother, she knew before I did who and what I was. She always believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself.