Dream d2701-s: Each Shape in Its Shadow

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the workroom wall was the first thing I saw: a pale wash, and on it the outlines of tools, each drawn in a thin dark stroke the way an inventory is kept when the keeper cannot always be there. The adze inside its adze-shape. The drawknife inside its arc. The two mortise chisels, short and long, each inside its own painted form. The marking gauge. The scratch awl. The brace, its sweep a perfect circle, the circle still good.

I walked the length of the wall and put no hand to anything.

Lano had come in behind me and was already settled under the tool chest, nose pressed to the floor seam, reading whatever the boards held. She did not move from there.

I opened the second book to the page for this place and wrote: workroom, cold house at Mossfell. Night five of six. The tools are present. Each sits in its outline. I drew a line through the entry.

What struck me, standing in the cold with the lamp held up: someone had gone around each tool carefully when the chalk was new, when the tool was new, when the keeping was still being set up. They had said with the brush, this is where this goes, and this is what it looks like when it is here. The outline is not decoration. The outline is the standard. Everything that followed from that day is measured against it: is the thing in the shape or isn't it.

In this place it is.

I wrote that. I closed the book. Lano stood, shook herself once, and led the way back to the door.

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