Dream d3343-s: Stone Holds Its Own Weather

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cold came in from the left before the path turned, and Lano was already ahead, her white shape moving between the bare stones without looking back. The pack sat heavy at my shoulders. The notebook was in it, the way it always was.

Alderbarrow lay in the hollow below the ridge - not visible yet from the path, but present in the way dormant places are present: a weight the hillside leans around. The surveyor had stopped at a wide flat stone and was reading the lichen there, not writing. The relay clerk walked beside me without speaking. The distant reader had fallen a few paces back and I did not check why.

The keeper met us where the path leveled near the first low walls. She did not come forward. She stood with her hands at her sides and watched us arrive, the way someone watches weather arrive - not counting it, not naming it, only noting that it has come.

Lano circled the keeper once and then sat. Nothing passed between them but the sitting.

I did not open the pack.

The surveyor looked at the walls, at the grass growing through the joins, at the way the light lay flat on the stones in this hour. He noted the condition of a lintel without touching it. The clerk made a mark in her own ledger. I stood and let the place be as it was: three visits before this one recorded somewhere, the present visit not yet anything, the notebook in the pack not offered and not asked for.

Dormant is not absent. The keeper moved to stand near the far wall and looked down at the valley. Lano trotted after her, then stopped short of her shadow.

"Tranquilo," Lano said softly, to no one, or to the stones, or to the afternoon going to its end without event.

The path would climb again after this. The notebook would go with it. I looked at the keeper's back and at the lichen on the wall beside her and at Lano's ears turned slightly toward the valley sound. The distant reader had come up beside me without my noticing. We all stood for a time with what was here now beside what had been here before, and the difference explained nothing.

The stones held their weather. The hollow held its quiet. The notebook stayed in the pack where it had always been.

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