Dream d3326-s: Lamplight on the Drawn Margin

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the stove bench held the warmth of the previous night and not much more. The tamaracks outside the window had dropped what they would drop; what remained on the branches was dry and stayed. Lano sat beside the bench with her nose tilted toward the gap under the door, taking in whatever arrived from the dark.

The clerk had the sheet open on the bench. In one column, four witnessed visits, the earliest in a different hand. In the adjacent column, the drawn line. Nothing was written under it. I watched the clerk read the line again, set the pen beside the sheet, and leave it.

The keeper moved through the room once, checking the stove's draft. The fire was adequate. No one said so. The surveyor had left measurements on the sill from some earlier part of the evening - a folded note, a mark in pencil on the frame, two numbers I did not record. I did not need to.

Tamarackmoss in its dormant condition: the water table down from where the first account placed it, the hummocks still holding their shapes, the moss dry enough to crackle if you pressed it. It held anyway; it remembered how. The night did not ask the place to explain this.

Lano lifted her head once toward the far corner of the room, then settled. Whatever she had tracked from the door had moved on or resolved into nothing.

The clerk added the date in the margin - today's date, not the date of the earlier visits. The drawn line stayed as it was. I watched this and understood it as the correct notation: the place continues, the record notes the continuation, the space under the drawn line is not an error.

Outside, one of the tamaracks held a sound in its upper branches - not wind exactly, but the movement of something that had been resting there and had decided to shift. The sound reached the window and stopped. The bench was still warm. The lamp did not need attending.

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