Dream d3505-s: Lano First at the Turning

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the last morning of Quillfield was already in the hedges when we came to the lane. The keeper of the place stood at the edge of the cut rows, not watching us go, watching the rows themselves where the mower had finished and left off, and the green was laid flat against the stubble in long even lines still holding the shape of the pass.

I set the sheet down at the post where the lane began. A date and a place - Quillfield written across it in the way the relay clerk had written all the others, and nothing below that but the white of the paper and the date. The post was old wood, notched at the base where the lane gate used to hang, and I tucked the sheet into the notch and left it there without a stone to weight it.

Lano was already ahead on the lane. She did not look back. Her ears were forward and her tail low and easy, moving with each step, and the lane curved ahead of her toward the part of the way that was not finished in the way things are not finished before you reach them.

The entry-keeper said nothing. She had been at the boundary since first light, standing where the records placed her, and she watched the sheet settle into the notch and said nothing about it. The relay clerk had already gone the other road.

The place kept the sheet in the way it kept everything from that residency - without ceremony and without haste. The dew came into the paper before we had gone fifty meters. By the time I looked back, once, the keeper of the place had not moved from the rows, and the sheet was still in the notch, and the hedges behind held the night in their lower branches in the way hedges hold things until the light reaches there.

Lano did not stop. She went on along the lane, and I went after her, and the way ahead was unfinished in the way all lanes are before you have walked them, which is not the same as impassable, and Quillfield was behind us in the cut rows and the notch and the keeper standing where the record said to stand.

The notebook was in my pack, closed.

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