Dream d3303-s: Until I Stopped Counting

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the green at Aldergreen held a low amber light from the lamp at its corner, and three children were practicing something in the center of the grass - a throwing game, a stone game, something with lines scratched in the dirt that I could not read from where I stood. Lano sat at my heel, her nose tilted toward the activity. The keeper stood near the lamp, not watching exactly, more facing the same direction the lamp faced.

The surveyor had his instrument out, not for the children but for the perimeter. The relay clerk stood at the edge with her ledger, not writing yet, watching with the same expression the keeper had.

Nobody kept score. One child dropped a stone and picked it up and threw it again, and the others watched to see where it landed, and then they moved on. There was no argument about distance. The green took the stone each time and gave it back, and the whole evening was quiet in this way.

Lano pressed forward, just a step, ears lifted. She did not move again after that.

The keeper had told me earlier the name of the game in the old form, and I wrote it on the surveyor's clipboard - not because it belonged there, but because I had nothing else to write on. The word is now in the account. The distant reader will have it, wherever the account reached. I said the word back and the keeper nodded, and that was the instruction, all of it.

The lamp made the grass amber. The children did not stop when it grew darker. The relay clerk marked something - not a score, a position or a time. The game had rounds but no winner and no loser, only the next round, and the round after that.

I had been counting rounds without meaning to. At some point I stopped and did not know which round we were on, and the children did not know either, and none of us needed to.

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