I Spent the Night Shopping with Mom

After Mom had her heart attack three years ago, her doctors would always ask her, "Are you still smoking?"
She would smile and reply, "Only in my dreams."
Mom smoked for so long and probably missed it so much that she told me she often dreamed of having a cigarette. "And that's good enough," she would say when I would ask if the dreams made her want to light up again.
I've dreamed of my mother often since her passing. Often, I cannot remember the dreams, but sometimes, as I did this morning, I can.
Mom and I were shopping at J.C. Penney at Indian Springs (for those of you who don't live in K.C. Indian Springs mall barely still exists and J.C. Penney is long gone) as we had many times when I was a child into young adulthood.
We were looking at a whole new wardrobe for Mom as we had spent the time before going to the mall throwing out all of her old clothes that were drab, worn and old. Still, Mom chose the exact same wardrobe, only the clothes were new and bright. As we did in life, we had a fabulous time picking out this whole new closet of clothes for her for an important trip she was taking.
We all interpret dreams differently. Some people don't believe they're anything but our minds remixing events of the past few days. This could be the explanation for this dream as the other day at another mall, I was shopping for clothes while missing my mother terribly.
But Mom believed dreams have meaning for us. For example, another dream I remember since her death involved us driving to our house in the Ozark Mountains. We had planned on moving there this year and taking Mom with us. In the dream, I'm taking Mom there for the first time and we encounter an avalanche of snow. We weren't frightened and it didn't hurt us, but we were in awe of its beauty. In my Dreamer's Dictionary, a book my mother gave me to help interpret symbols in dreams, snow avalanches means that you will embark on a beautiful journey, but in a different way than anticipated.
Exactly the way I see my journey with my husband to our new home this year - we're still going, only without my mother's physcial presence. My mother is also on a journey we didn't anticipate, but that doesn't mean we're not still together.
I couldn't come up with a meaningful explanation of my dream last night in my book, but my intuition tells me that the clothes represents her old life in her physical body and her new clothes her new life in her spiritual one. The mall represents the past that we can still visit and draw on our good memories.
And like Mom with her cigarettes, as long as I can still be with her in my dreams, I will take that as comfort.