Dream d3369-s: What Moss Already Knew

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the orchard was at rest. Not abandoned - the trees were pruned, the furrows between them clear, the air still carrying the finish of something that grew here and was taken in its season. Lano moved ahead of me on the path, her nose low, reading the pressed grass where someone had come through earlier in the day.

I had the notebook under my arm. It was the only one still unread on this stretch - the others went into spoken accounts weeks back, passed hand to hand until they reached whoever would carry them into the record. This one I had been holding since the road turned toward Garnetbrook, feeling its weight shift each time the path bent.

The orchard ran beside us. Moss on the lower bark, umber where the light caught the exposed wood. The surveyor had stopped back at the lane gate, measuring the width of the entrance posts. The relay clerk waited at the edge, out of the rows, not moving closer. There is a particular quiet to places that have been witnessed before - not sealed, only known. Garnetbrook had that quality. The presence of it asked something I could not answer by looking at the notebook, only by standing still.

A keeper came in from the far side, not from the lane but through a gap between the last two rows. She did not look at me first. She looked at the near rail, then at the notebook under my arm, then past me toward the far rail where a coil of twine hung. She went to it. Lano watched her, ears up, then settled back against my leg.

The keeper lifted the twine from the rail and looped it over her shoulder. She did not ask about the notebook. She did not say where she was going with the twine. She moved between the rows toward the far end of the orchard, and the sound of her footsteps on the packed earth faded before she was out of sight.

I did not follow her. I stood at the edge of the row with the notebook still under my arm. The distant reader was somewhere I could not see. The orchard went on - the branches, the moss, the air that smelled of old wood and turned soil and something just past the edge of season.

Lano lifted her nose toward the dark between the trees.

Somewhere in the far rows a branch settled, and the orchard did not change.

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