Dream d3368-s: Soil and Open Pages

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I laid the notebook open on the potting bench and stepped out into the yard.

The night was cool, carrying old clay and something more bitter beneath it, the residue of what had overwintered and been cleared. Garnetbrook's potting yard was long and low, sheltered on three sides by a wooden fence that had grayed and softened over time. The fourth side opened onto the field. The beds had been emptied but not stripped; old root systems pressed at the surface like something still deciding.

Lano moved ahead of me along the row, her nose working the soil. She paused at a low trough, sniffed the interior, moved on without ceremony. At the far end she turned and came partway back, then sat and watched the open gate.

The keeper was near the fence's far corner, working in amber light from a lantern hung on a post. She lifted a clay pot, looked at the base, set it with the others. She did not look toward the bench where the notebook lay.

The relay clerk stood near the gate, watching the field. The surveyor walked the inside edge of the yard, hands at her sides, boots quiet on the packed earth, not measuring anything. The distant reader had taken the low stool at the corner and sat facing away from the bench, her back to it, her face toward whatever the field held in the dark.

The notebook's pages moved slightly in the air that came off the field. Neither page turned on its own.

I stood in the middle of the yard and let Garnetbrook be what it was. The place had been here before the visits; it would continue after. The beds held the shape of what they had grown. The fence held decades of weather in its grain. The keeper finished her row, lifted the lantern, walked toward the gate without pausing at the bench.

Lano came back and sat near my feet. She looked up once, then returned her attention to the field.

The soil remembered the arrangement even without the plants. The night held it without saying so. I did not close the notebook. I did not carry it forward. I left it open on the bench where the yard could answer in its own time, which was not the same as mine.

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