Dream d3291-s: The Green That Held

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the heath track ran between shoulders of brown bracken, and the long mound rose ahead of us with its crown still green.

The clerk carried the folded account and did not open it. The surveyor walked the perimeter of the mound, counting paces along the lower edge where the turf had thickened. A keeper stood near the near end, hands loose at the sides, watching us arrive the way a person watches weather they have seen before.

Lano trotted ahead, nose low on the path, then lifted her head when the mound's shadow fell across her. She went around the near end at a wide angle and stood looking back at me from the far side, ears up.

The account had already gone out. What arrived here now was the place itself, continuing.

I walked the length of the mound. The heath on either side was the colour of spent straw, of dried blood, of mud dried in layers. The mound's turf was green in the way that old things sometimes are: a deep kept green, not new growth, not trimmed. It had held its colour through the season without being asked.

The clerk set the pack down near a flat stone and opened the record to a fresh page. I called the surveyor over and we marked the near end, the far end, the height at the crown, the width at the base. The keeper watched. When the surveyor measured the gap between two low stakes already in the ground - stakes from a visit none of us had made - the keeper said nothing. I noted the stakes and the distance and wrote nothing else about them.

The night came in from the east, which is where it always comes in. Lano pressed against my leg. I put my hand on her head and she stood still for a moment before she moved away again, circling back toward the mound's near end.

The account had been read elsewhere by now. Whatever had been witnessed before sat in the record, fixed. This green was here now in the same way the brown heath was here: present, not explained, not diminished.

The clerk wrote the date. The surveyor rolled the measuring cord. The keeper had not moved from the near end, and when we gathered at the track again the keeper was still standing there, visible against the mound's edge until the dark made the two things one.

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