Dream d3330-s: The Air Before Wind

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we gathered our things in the grey before sunrise and the stove in the Tamarackmoss cabin still held coals. The keeper had not yet damped it. Smoke climbed from the chimney in a single column, perfectly upright, which meant the air had not decided anything yet.

Lano watched the surveyor roll the last chart. She had been watching everything for three days, and she watched this the same way - sitting near the door with her chin slightly raised, ears forward.

The clerk carried the record out first and set it in the cart. Nobody checked it against the copy. The copy was already gone, handed somewhere else in an earlier week, read by the distant reader in a room we would not see. That transaction was closed.

The keeper stood at the threshold without moving. Not blocking. Just present in the way that a place has a person who stands at its edge when the edge is being reached.

The larches along the road held their color. Umber at the tips, still green at the branch, exactly as they had been on night one. The road ran straight enough that you could see where it bent at the ridgeline, and nothing was moving on it.

I was the last one out. I closed the latch on the cabin door and stood a moment in the yard. The smoke kept rising. No lean to it. The air was entirely still, the way air is still just before it decides to become weather.

Lano had already reached the road. She stood facing the direction we were heading, not looking back. The surveyor and the clerk were ahead of her, their boots dark on the frost.

The keeper did not follow to the road.

I walked to where Lano waited and we started along the larch road, and behind us the smoke kept going straight up into the pale sky as if Tamarackmoss had nothing to say about the direction we left in.

---