Dream d3275-s: Thin Bark, Warm Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the orchard bank at Rowanbrook was dark above the lower field, and the old trees held their shapes in the lamplight. I knew the spot by the drop of the ground: the particular angle where the bank flattens and the grass grows wetter. Someone had put a sapling there. A thin whip of wood, one stake, a rag of cloth wrapped around the binding so the cord would not cut.

Lano moved ahead of me and stopped at the base, her nose low, reading the turned soil.

The keeper was already there, holding a lamp at arm's length. She did not look up when we arrived. The clerk stood to one side with the field book open to a fresh page, the date written at the top. She waited.

The surveyor knelt and checked the stake with two fingers, pushing lightly to test the give. It held. He wrote something in his record and put the pencil away without speaking.

Last time, the relay had rested against the older apple trunk in a cloth sling. That was recorded. The record left. Someone read it at a distance I cannot see from here, and no answer traveled back. The sapling stands in the same coordinates.

The place is warm. This I had not forgotten, but I feel it again as a new fact: the bank holds heat after dark, something in the slope, the way the air settles here at the edge of the old trees. Apples have begun to fall. I can smell them fermenting in the grass below, a soft and useful rot.

The sapling is no taller than my chest. A few leaves still hold on. I do not know what kind it will become.

The keeper lifts the lamp to the crown, inspecting the last leaves in the amber light. She finds something. I watch her face and cannot name what it is, only that her attention does not ask for anything from us. She has seen what she came to see.

Lano sits against my leg. The rag on the stake moves faintly in the orchard air, the smallest motion. The clerk writes a line across the bottom of the page and does not read it back.

The trees go on dropping their fruit in the dark below us.

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