Dream d3461-s: Under the Juniper Line

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road narrowed to gravel before I could see the rooftops, and what I saw first was the line of juniper running level and dark against the late sky, holding the low shapes of the settlement below it like a hand cupped over a candle.

Lano trotted ahead, nose tilted at something in the ditch grass, then circled back and pressed once against my calf before going ahead again. The folded sheet was in my right hand. The notebook stayed shut under my arm.

The keeper was standing near the fence gate, not watching the road but watching a hen that had come out past the post and stood uncertain in the gravel. When I came even with the gate the keeper turned and gave a short nod and said nothing about where I had come from. I did not say it either.

I held out the folded sheet. The keeper took it between two fingers and looked at the fold, not the writing, the way you might check a letter had been sealed before you carried it forward. Then the keeper tucked it behind the crossbar of the gate post where a wooden pin held two planks together, pressing the paper flat under the pin so the wind could not take it.

I walked on.

No one opened it. The keeper went back to watching the hen. Lano sniffed once at the base of the gate post, then trotted after me without looking back.

The rooftops lay low the whole length of the village and the juniper held its line above them. Smoke came from one chimney and bent east. A dog farther in barked once and stopped. Somewhere a shutter was being latched from inside and the sound of it crossed the lane clear and domestic and finished.

I did not know what the keeper would do with the sheet in the morning or whether the pin would hold through the night. The fold was dry. The place was warm. The gate post had not moved. Whatever the record had noted when it called on this place, the place was doing it still, the way a room stays itself after the last person has gone out and the door stands closed and nothing inside has changed.

Lano padded close by the time we reached the far end of the lane. The juniper line ended where the path opened again into the dark beyond the last roof.

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