Dream On

My wife dreams big. She gets a picture in her head of what something could be and it quickly becomes very real to her. No sooner had the idea struck her to build a hobbit-hole in our backyard, it became one of her main ambitions. We were going to have a hobbit-hole in our backyard. We just were.

My wife is the dreamer. I am the doer. I get to be the one who turns the before picture into the after picture. Usually, I just can't see it (at least at first)--whatever the idea is. It's not that I think her ideas are bad, it's just that I can't see a realistic possibility that I will be able to achieve her vision. But through our marriage, she has proven time and again that if she can dream it, I can do it.

For a long time, I kept telling my wife that this is one dream that would have to remain a dream. I thought it would be totally awesome IF we could do it, but that was a really big "if." I ran countless scenarios through my mind on how this could come to be, and each time I thought, "There is no way." Whatever design I thought of seemed like it would be either structurally unsound or else ridiculously expensive.

I tried to put it out of my mind, but my wife was persistent. She didn't prod me or anything. She just continued to talk about it as if it were a matter of fact--to family, to friends, to the kids and me. "It is going to be so great when we get the hobbit-hole built," she would say. I wanted it to happen, too, but I lacked the vision.