What’s In A Dream

Who remembers making soup noodles with Mom? Well, last night, that’s exactly what I dreamed about doing.

As a kid, my job was always to keep cranking. Mom and/or Aunt Mary would do all of the working with the dough. They would take the small dough packages and put them through the noodle maker, each pass making dough into a longer and thinner strip. I cranked, and was allowed to adjust the machine to thin the dough with each pass through. Finally, when it was the right size, Mom would cut the long strips across into inch or inch and a half wide pieces. These pieces would be fed through one by one to cut the individual noodles. Again, I was tending the crank, but at this part, I would also be allowed to feed the pieces of dough into the machine, as long as I would put them in straight.

Funny what we remember as we get older. It must be a good 20 years or so since I’ve helped with this task. Even as I got older, my position in the noodle making process never changed. I cranked, adjusted the machine and got to cut the final pieces into noodles. And, of course, sprinkle the cut noodles onto a sheet that was placed on all of the beds to give the noodles a place to dry.

This process is not something I have ever done on my own. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve thought much about it in the last 20 years. But, last night in my dream, I was the noodle maker. Mom was there, telling me what to do. Unfortunately, what she was telling me did not end up being done as she told me. In my dream, I was the one trying to feed the dough into the machine to make the long thin strips. What came out was just about everything but. Mom couldn’t figure out how in the heck I was going to get noodles out of the mess I was making!

The sounds and the smells all came back in the dream. If I think about it hard enough right now, I can still smell the flour. Or taste what the raw dough tastes like. C’mon now, we’ve all snitched a few pieces of the raw dough. That was half the fun of helping. I remember the little pan that caught the cut noodles. I can feel the noodles in my hand as I take them and spread them out on the beds for drying.

I don’t know if I’ll ever run out and buy a noodle making machine and make my own home made noodles. But at least for a little while in my dream, I was back to when life was easier, spending an afternoon with Mom making noodles. And that ain’t a bad way to dream the night away.