Dream d3376-s: Straw from the Other Side

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the barn smelled of dry grass and something older, animal heat soaked into the boards over many winters. I had been sitting with my back to the center post since before the lamps outside went low, the notebook on the bale beside me, its cover picking up dust from the last hour of stillness. Lano was curled against the base of the post, her nose on her forepaws, her eyes following nothing I could see.

The door opened without much sound. The keeper came in carrying a wooden fork, already moving toward the near side of the barn, and then stopped. Not a full stop, more a hesitation in the stride, the way a person does when they notice something that does not need addressing. The notebook sat there on the bale. The keeper looked at it for a moment, a real look, the kind that registers a thing as belonging somewhere even if its address is not yet clear.

Then the keeper went around. Took the long way to the far bale, not the near one. Pulled a good armful of straw with the fork and carried it back toward the door. The notebook was still on the bale when the door closed.

I wrote the name Harrowbridge in the sheet, the fourth line under this heading. The condition is warm. Four visits now, this one included. The place had been here long enough that the straw smell and the keeper's route around the bale felt like the same fact, neither one requiring the other to be explained.

Lano lifted her head when the door closed, then set it down again. Outside there was wind moving through something, maybe the willow on the south side, maybe just the eave boards shifting in the cold. The barn was quiet in the particular way of a space that has been used all day and is resting.

The notebook had not moved from the bale. I did not move it either.

The seventy-five unentered places on the sheet wait the way all unentered places wait, without urgency. The present place is entered now. The keeper had come for straw and gone with straw. That is what happened here, and it is enough to write down.

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