'O cantero

'O cantero is the chamber pot, from the days when homes had no bathroom. The Smorfia was never ashamed of the body and its business: at twenty-seven it put the most prosaic object in the house, and gave it a serious meaning — letting go, throwing out, cleaning up. In a tradition born in the back alleys, relief is something you name. In dreams, twenty-seven arrives when something needs clearing out. A matter closed after months, something finally said, a habit let go. It isn’t an elegant number, and that’s exactly the point: it speaks of that not-so-noble and very necessary moment when you unload a weight. The images that lead here are a little sampler. The chamber pot. Poultry, which scratches around in the dirt and lives there just fine. The innocents and the scoundrel, who are prey and predator — the one who suffers and the one who takes advantage. And the library, which seems out of place and instead closes the circle: after the cleanup, what remains is what’s worth keeping. If twenty-seven has come up in your dream, the Smorfia is pointing to something to let go of. It doesn’t say what, and it doesn’t tell you to do it right away. It signals that in your dream there was excess weight, and that you noticed it enough to bring it here.