Dream d3372-s: Notebook Among Old Linen Fields

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road into Harrowbridge ran between fields the colour of cloth that had been washed too many times, and the sky was the kind of pale that makes distances uncertain. Lano trotted ahead, her white coat catching whatever brightness was left in the afternoon, nose working the ditch grass as we came over the low bridge and into the settlement proper.

The relay clerk stood at the corner where two roads met, sorting papers against her hip. I passed close enough that she glanced up, saw the notebook under my arm, and looked back at her papers. Her expression held nothing particular about it. The notebook was an object I carried, same as the others carried their tools and ledgers.

A keeper was pulling shutters closed on a storehouse, working methodically from one end to the other. The hinges were old and each shutter swung with a different resistance. He did not pause when we came through, only continued along the row - pull, catch, latch - the sound falling into the general quiet of the settlement at the end of its day.

Lano found a spot near the surveyor's equipment case, set flat against the wall, and sat there with her ears raised. The surveyor was measuring something along the roofline with a long rod, calling numbers to no one in particular, as if the building were the one who needed to know them. The distant reader had taken a chair outside a doorway and was watching the fields rather than reading anything. Her stillness was the complete kind.

I stood where the two roads met and held the notebook under my arm and felt for who might receive it by what the place was doing. The fields gave nothing back but their own colour. The clock on the storehouse wall had stopped at a time that might have been morning. Smoke from the far end of the settlement came straight up in the windless air.

Warm, Harrowbridge. Not welcoming, not unwelcoming - warm the way a stone is warm that has been sitting in sun all day, holding what was given to it before we arrived. The clerk finished sorting. The keeper latched the final shutter. Lano lifted her nose from the base of the wall and found my hand with the top of her head.

I did not open the notebook. Nobody was here for it yet, or perhaps the place itself was still deciding. I stood in the old linen light and let Harrowbridge go on around me.

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