Dream d3453-s: Turned Without Hurry

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent into Pewtermill and the mill wheel was already turning.

The water came through a cut in the hill and the wheel caught it without hurry, turning at the pace of the current, not faster. The smoke from the nearest chimney stood straight in the cold air. Behind the first row of roofs another chimney, same smoke, same column going up without lean or drift. Whatever wind there had been had stopped.

Lano moved ahead of me on the road's edge, nose low to the verge, pausing at the place where the road became the town. She lifted her head and watched the wheel a moment, then her ears settled and she went on.

There was a keeper by the gate where the road entered the yard. She did not ask what we carried and I did not explain. I put the notebook into my coat and left it there. The relay clerk had walked in ahead of us and stood by the wall checking the mark in the register. The entry-keeper waited under the overhang with nothing in her hands.

The wheel turned. Water fell off the paddles into the lower channel. The sound it made was the same as the mill wheel the entry-keeper had named in the record, which meant the entry was live, which meant no one had been here before and named it.

I wrote the name. I wrote the wheel and the smoke and the keeper at the gate. I wrote the cold air and the light on the wet paddles. Lano had found a stone near the millpond and carried it a short way before setting it down to smell something in the grass.

The relay clerk walked a circle of the yard and came back and said nothing about what he had found there, because there was nothing wrong with what he had found there. The keeper went inside. The entry-keeper made her mark in the margin of the sheet.

The smoke kept going straight up. The mill wheel kept turning. I counted nothing, judged nothing, went nowhere else in the yard. The account was made and the place did not need to know it had been made. Lano came back to the gate and sat, and her tail moved once against the ground, and then she was watching the wheel go around.

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