Dream d3378-s: What the Harrow Forgets First

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the field edge on the seventh morning and Harrowbridge was already behind me in the way that towns go behind you before you have turned. Lano stood beside my left boot, nose lifted, reading the air in the direction of the mill. The surveyor was ahead on the road, not looking back. The relay clerk stood a little apart with his notes folded into his coat pocket. The distant reader had not come down to the field edge; I had last seen her at the window of the stone house above the millrace, sitting, watching nothing in particular.

The notebook was in my bag. I had carried it through all seven nights without opening it. Nobody had asked after it. The keeper of the place had walked past me twice in the early grey of this last morning and each time his eyes had come to the bag and moved on without resting there. He had not reached. He had not asked. He had gone inside again, and now the door was closed.

From the field the hawthorn hedge ran straight a little way and then the rooflines rose above it: three chimneys, the mill gable, the one pine that stood taller than everything. Smoke from only two of the chimneys. The morning on the stone was warm amber and even. Harrowbridge was going on. A door I couldn't see opened and closed somewhere inside the village, the sound of it arriving flat across the damp grass. A cow in a yard called once and was not answered.

Lano turned her head sharply toward the village, ears lifted, then settled again. Whatever she had heard had been ordinary enough.

I shifted the bag on my shoulder. The notebook moved inside it with the small and particular weight of paper that has not been opened. I had looked at nothing in it through seven nights and the village had not asked and the road had not asked. Something in that felt right in the way a fieldstone lying in a stream feels right - not because it is beautiful but because the water is easy with it being there and easy with it going on.

The surveyor called from ahead. The relay clerk began walking. Lano trotted forward three steps and stopped, looked back at me, then at the village, then at me again.

The smoke rose. The pine stood above the gable. The mill wheel turned in the water it had always had.

I walked.

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