Dream d3277-s: One Roof Stays Grey

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the orchard ran along the ridge and every tree held its last fruit. Lano moved ahead of me through the long grass between the rows, her nose low, her tail a flag. The keeper was already there when we arrived - standing at the far end where the ground dropped away and the valley opened below. She did not turn when she heard us.

From the ridge the valley spread in every direction green. Hedgerows and pasture and the dark lines of streams, all of it green except one grey roof on the near slope, a farmhouse or a store, its slates the color of weathered weather. We had noted it before. It was still grey.

The surveyor marked nothing; we had measured this place in earlier visits, and tonight the instruments rested at the base of a pear tree. The keeper had left something on the lowest branch - a fold of cloth, the kind used to cover a jar lid. I lifted it and set it in my pocket without opening it. Lano watched me do it, then walked a slow circle around the trunk with her head still down.

The clerk sat on the stone wall at the orchard's upper edge and copied nothing. He held the open ledger but his pen was dry. We had sent the account; it had gone ahead of us to be read elsewhere, and we would not hear it read back. That was the shape of this kind of visit. You return and the place has gone on without knowing you heard it.

An amber light came from the keeper's lantern, set in the fork of the same pear tree. It did not reach the valley. The valley was lit by its own dusk, a long pale light from the west that made the green almost blue.

Lano found something in the grass and barked once, softly. I went to look. A small grey feather, the kind a pigeon loses. I let it lie.

The grey roof below did not change. The valley went on being green. The keeper had not turned to face us by the time the light fully failed, and we did not ask her to.

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