Dream d3411-s: Wool Going Left

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the low meadow was wet underfoot, a thin grass running all the way to the edge of the road where the fork begins. I was sitting on a fallen branch with the notebook closed on my knee, and I had not opened it. Lano was at the far end of the meadow, nose to the ground, working a slow arc through the damp grass.

From here the town sits in the fork like something settled rather than built. Both roads are full. A cart with bundled wool goes left. Two women on foot go right. A man on horseback cuts between them without slowing, and the gap he makes closes at once. The sound comes in waves, hooves and voices and the groan of a wheel axle, and then a pause, and then more of it.

The entry-keeper stands near the milestone where the roads divide. She has a board under one arm and is watching the left road. The relay clerk is at the inn door on the near corner, not going in, one shoulder to the door frame. They are not talking to each other. The town goes on without their consultation.

I opened the notebook and wrote: two roads, both busy. I wrote: wool going left. I did not write what I made of it or what it meant for the count. I have had the notebook long enough that I have stopped asking who is meant to read it.

Lano trotted back across the meadow and sat beside the branch, close enough that her flank pressed warm against my calf. She did not look at me. She looked at the road.

A keeper of the place was moving along the near side of the inn with a broom, sweeping toward the gutter in short, even strokes. He did not look up at the cart or the rider. He swept. The road changed nothing for it.

I sat until the light shifted and the wool cart was gone and a second one had come and gone after it. The left road thinned for a while. The right road did not thin at all. Both had been going somewhere before I arrived. Both went on.

The notebook was on the branch beside me when I stood. I picked it up. Lano watched the road one more second, then followed.

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