Dream d3271-s: Loud Brook, Soft Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the brook spoke before I could see it, a cold rushing sound through rowan branches, louder than the place had any reason to be. The path had taken in the rain and given itself over; each step pressed water up around my boots, and Lano, moving ahead of me, left prints that filled as she went.

She paused at a gap in the alders where lamplight pressed through from somewhere closer to the house. Her nose worked the air near the root-line. Her tail moved once.

The keeper was standing at the bank's edge where rowan roots step down into the gravel. She had a lamp in her near hand and was watching the water the way a person watches something that has been speaking a long time. She did not look up when we came through the gap, or if she did, she had turned back before I marked it.

The clerk had the ledger open at the board laid flat across two stone posts near the bank. I knew the board from the account sent from this place; I had not known it was painted. It was painted now, some dark color the lamplight made amber, the surface worn smooth at the near edge where hands had rested. I noted the color. I wrote nothing about what I had expected.

The surveyor was measuring the bank's edge, pacing back from the root-line with the cord stretched taut. The distant reader sat further along the path, back to us, facing the direction the brook ran.

I wrote the date, the sound of the water, the softness of the path, the lamp, the painted board. I wrote the berries on the rowan branch, dark and heavy and wet. I counted one cluster and then stopped, because the place did not ask for the number.

Lano settled beside the keeper's feet without being invited. The keeper looked down at her once.

The brook kept going. The rowan boughs shifted in the small wind that came off the water. The account had traveled and been read, and the place was going on exactly as it had before any of that happened, which was right.

---