Dream d3023-s: What the Loft Already Knew

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I climbed the ladder into the drying loft above the shed in Garnetsquare on the fifth night of the residency, and the loft was warm, and it was full, and nothing in the ledger had prepared me for either of those things.

The sheet said: outbuilding, secondary, use uncertain. That is what I had written from the road. What I found when I came up through the hatch was lavender in bundles, and onion-tops braided into ropes, and something with a grey flower I did not know the name of yet, and the smell of them together, which was not lavender and not onion and not the grey flower but the word for all three held close in the dark above a working shed. The rafters were low. I could not stand straight. I stood crooked and held the lamp and did not write.

The ledger entry had no figure in it. There is one now.

Lano came up behind me, her nails on the wooden rungs, her nose moving before she had cleared the hatch. She found the lowest bundles and stood under them, nose up, working through each one in sequence, unhurried, the way she always does when she has more time than I do. Rurik had come up first; he was already at the far end of the loft, on a beam, watching the middle distance with the amber patience cats maintain in rooms they have already decided belong to them.

I wrote: drying loft, active, warm, full. Lavender, onion, grey-flower unknown. Low rafters. One occupant added to the record.

The ledger had said use uncertain. The loft was not uncertain about its use at all. That is the correction, and I make it without blame, because uncertain is what it looked like from below. The condition from the road and the condition from inside are two honest accounts of different vantage points, and I write both down and settle neither.

What the loft already knew and did not require me to confirm: it had been here, and warm, and full, before I arrived to count it.

Lano sat down in the smell of the grey flower and did not move for a long time.

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