Dream d3477-s: Iron in the Long Grass

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gateway to Ospreyfield had come down some time ago, not recently. The posts still stood on either side but the crosspiece had collapsed and the gate lay stretched in the grass at the entrance, hinges still attached to the left post, the iron bars gone the color of the soil around them.

The keeper was moving along the inner edge of the fence with a stick. Not repairing anything. Just moving. Lano trotted ahead of me through the gap where the gate lay and stopped at a patch of nettles to sniff, her small white shape very clear against the green.

I had the sheet in my hand. A date and a name and nothing behind it. I set it on the uppermost bar of the gate, the one facing the sky, and placed a flat stone I'd found on the path on top of it, so the wind would have to do more work.

The keeper came around and looked at the gate without looking at me. He did not read the sheet. He walked back toward the outbuilding on the near side of the field and did not return.

Lano sat beside the gate. Her ears tipped forward once, then settled.

The grass around the gate had grown over the lower bars, threading through the ironwork in the slow way that grass does when nothing moves for a season. It would go on doing that. The sheet had the date pressed between the stone and the bar, and the field went on past it, long and pale at the edges where the light was going.

I stood for a time in the gap where the gate had hung. The posts were still sound. Nothing had been lifted because nothing had needed to be lifted. The gate was in the grass and the grass was in the gate and the place had its own arrangement about the matter.

A pigeon crossed the far end of the field at low height and disappeared into the hedgerow. Lano watched it go.

I walked through.

The sheet stayed behind me with its date and its name. The stone held it against the bar and the bar held it against the earth and the field went on keeping it in the only way Ospreyfield kept anything in its present condition: flat, still, in the grass, undisturbed.

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