Dream d3413-s: The Crossing Keeps Its Count

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano and I came to the crossing at Yarrowcrossing before the light had decided anything. Two roads met there and ran away from each other, and neither of them held anyone. The surface of the crossing was pressed flat by use and the grass at its edges had been trodden into a fine pale dust that sat without blowing.

The entry-keeper was already at the crossing when we arrived. She stood with her back to one road and her face toward nothing in particular, holding the ledger open at her side the way someone holds a coat they have just taken off. She did not look up.

The keeper of the place came from the direction of the low building that sat back from the crossing. He moved across the pressed ground with the deliberate quietness of someone who has walked the same distance so many times that the body does it without report. He carried a wooden-handled thing, a rake or a long-handled broom, though he did not use it. He set it against the side of the building and stood.

Lano went to the center of the crossing and sat down. Her ears were up. She looked at one road and then the other, then at the place where they met, and her nose worked at something steady. Then she put her chin down and watched the ground.

The relay clerk came along the far road. She walked without hurrying and she did not look toward the building. She reached the crossing and stopped at its edge. She wrote something in her small book and then held still, as if listening for something to finish.

I had the notebook with me. I did not open it.

The four of us were there for a while. The roads stayed empty. The light went on doing what it was doing, which was reddening the packed earth slightly and laying long shadows along the ruts. The keeper looked at the crossing. The entry-keeper turned a page in the ledger without reading the page she had turned from. The relay clerk's pen was still.

Lano shifted her weight and pressed her nose flat against the ground. She breathed out slowly.

The relay clerk walked on. The keeper went back inside. The entry-keeper closed the ledger and stood a moment longer, then she too went.

Warm, the crossing. A condition easy to miss, that kind. It did not require attendance. It was warm the way a place gets warm when it has been used regularly and well and then left to continue on its own terms.

Lano and I remained at the crossing until nothing remained to witness, which was a long time, and then we walked on.

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