I hope you enjoy this story. I got the idea for this one when I woke up from a dream. The actual dream was very short, so I added just a little bit of detail to it to make it longer and to fill in a little detail.
Dreaming
By Braceface2015
I keep hearing about all the sightings that members have of people in braces. I have to admit that I get jealous of some of them and wish that I had one to write about. Finally, I have one of my own.
I was at one of those historic towns that families like to visit when they are travelling. There were a few of us in the group that was walking around, looking at the buildings and the displays inside. In the group were an older lady, nicely dressed, and a younger girl. As we were walking around, we talked about what we were seeing and how they had rebuilt the place to look like it had been there all the time.
Our group didn't rush, just moved at a steady pace that allowed the slowest person in our group, who was on crutches, to keep up with us easily. The older lady had quite a lot of interesting things to say about the town and she told us that she had been a teacher before she retired. As she talked, I noticed that she had a few gold fillings in her teeth, something that I had only seen on a few of my older relatives.
She had a bit of an accent that I found interesting and I couldn't narrow it down to the country of origin, so I asked her where she was born. She told me that she was born in Europe and had moved overseas as a teen.
As the time got closer to noon, more and more of the staff appeared around the town, many of them dressed in costumes from the time period that the town was from. Some were dressed as farmhands, with tools for working on the grounds, others as town's people. There were a few shops that made products the way that they did when the town was built, such as the bakery and barbershop, and some that were more for show, like the saloon and dry goods store.
It wasn't as if we were a group that was travelling together, and some people drifted off and others joined us. We saw some groups that seemed to have tour guides leading them around and telling them about the various buildings. The guides were all dressed in costumes.
As we were about to go into the general store, one of the guides came up to us and asked if we would like her to accompany us for a while. She had an accent that was similar to the older lady with us. The accent just seemed to fit with the outfit she had on and made it seem more authentic, along with her hairstyle, which seemed to be real, not a wig. Everyone seemed to like the idea, so she became our guide.
She smiled a lot, though she kept her teeth covered, even when she was telling us about the history of the store and the way that the goods inside were made and transported by horse and wagon from all over the country. Her costume was well-made and fit her as if it was made for her, which it probably was. The hem of her dress was ankle-length, exposing her sturdy and stylish shoes and the rest of her dress had plenty of lace at the cuffs, around the collar, which buttoned to the base of her neck, and along both sides of the rows of buttons down the front. The whole outfit looked comfortable and durable, and very elegant in the way that a well-dressed lady from that era would want to look.
It was hard to tell what her actual age was because of her makeup. The impression was that she wasn't as old as she looked and sounded, yet still not that young, maybe late middle age, maybe retired or close to it. Certainly not a young woman. As she talked, I kept getting flashes of colour from inside her mouth, very similar to what the teacher that was part of our group had.
As we were leaving the store, she bent over and looked at the nails of the younger girl and commented about how pretty her nails looked. When the girl held out her hands for the guide to look at, the lady took them in her hands and smiled a bit wider, and I got a flash of gold and silver from her lower jaw. I saw that the gold colour was from fillings in some of her teeth. Where the silver was from I couldn't tell until she looked up and smiled at us.
It turned out that not everything that she was wearing was from the historic era. Her smile revealed that she had ceramic braces on her lower jaw, and the flash of silver had come from the archwire and metal ligatures holding it in. As I looked closer, I saw that the wire wrapped around the bracket and was twisted to continue until it reached the next tooth, creating a fixed chain holding the lower teeth in place.
For the next while, I tried to position myself so that I had a good view of her mouth as she guided us around the town. Even though she seemed to try to keep her teeth covered, she only partially succeeded, and with me paying more attention to her mouth, I soon saw that she had ceramic brackets on her upper jaw as well, with the archwire held in with wire ligatures, though not in a chain like the bottom.
She encouraged us to ask questions if there was something that we saw that she hadn't talked about, and I asked a few questions just so that I would have her facing in my direction and I could see her mouth better.
All good things must come to an end at some point, and our tour eventually ended, but I got one last good look at her smile as she thanked us for visiting the town. It seemed as if she deliberately smiled in my direction, before winking at me and turning around to leave.
That is when I woke up in my bed and realized that it had all been a dream. I tried to get back to sleep so that I could continue dreaming, but alas, it doesn't work that way.
END
