Dream d3328-s: Umber at the Splitting Hour

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wood store stood at the edge of the lamplight, close enough that the smell of resin reached me before I could see the stacked rows clearly. The keeper worked with her back to the door, the axe rising and falling in a rhythm that needed nothing from me. Each log split cleanly down the grain - I heard the crack before I saw the halves fall apart and settle into the pile at her feet.

Lano had come ahead of me through the gap in the fence and sat now on a round of uncut wood, watching the keeper's arms. Her ears moved each time the axe struck.

The surveyor had his notebook out but was not writing in it. He stood at the near wall and ran one hand along the stacked ends of the seasoned wood - checking for something, or just remembering the texture. I did not ask.

I found this place last in something like late summer and the smell then had been different, greener. Now the bark on the upper rows was dry and pale at the edges, and the moss where the wood touched the back wall had drawn back from its own margins. I recorded this beside the other, without measuring the distance between them.

The keeper set another round upright on the block and split it. She did not look at me. The relay clerk stood near the door with her hands in her pockets and said nothing; she had handed over what she carried and was waiting in the ordinary way of someone who knows there is nothing more to do.

The lamp hung from a hook at the gable. The light it threw was amber on the fresh-cut faces of the wood, and darker where the old faces had weathered. I noted both.

Lano stepped down from her round and pressed briefly against my leg, then walked to the door and sat facing out. Whatever she smelled I could not smell. I stayed where I was.

The keeper went on splitting. She would stop when she had enough for one night and not before. I watched her work and did not count the pieces, only observed that she moved as if the stove were waiting and she was not in any particular hurry to answer it.

Outside, the tamaracks held what light was left in the sky. Inside, the resin smell and the lamp and the soft sound of Lano settling herself on the threshold. I had been here before. The place was still going.

---