'E ddoje zetelle

'E ddoje zetelle. Sixty-six is the two unmarried women, and the word tradition uses for them sounds unkind today: it comes from a time when a woman on her own was seen as an anomaly. It’s worth reading it with today’s eyes, because the deeper meaning of the number is something else — solitude by choice, waiting, independence. In dreams, sixty-six arrives when being on your own is involved. A choice of independence, a time when you’re enough for yourself, a circle made of a few people, always the same ones. And it also comes when the wait has grown long: something that hasn’t happened yet and maybe never will. The image that leads here is the spinsters, and in the Smorfia there are two of them, not one. That’s no small detail: it tells you that even solitude has company, that people who live outside the pattern stick together. It’s one of the sharpest observations on the whole list. If sixty-six showed up in your dream, there was a state of waiting or of independence. The Smorfia doesn’t say whether that’s good or bad, and we’re even less likely to: it depends on whether you chose it.