Dream d3527-s: The Hands Already Working

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the barley field rose from the flat ground before I reached the road's turning, a pale gold in the last of the afternoon light. The stalks stood close together, shoulder-high, their awns catching whatever breeze came from the valley. I stopped at the edge before the ditch.

Someone was already there.

She moved through the rows with a practiced steadiness I did not interrupt. I could not see her face from where I stood, only the rhythm of her arms: checking, adjusting, pausing at each cluster of stalks with her hands cupped briefly beneath the heads. She did not look up. The work had been ongoing before I arrived and would continue after I left, and there was a kind of rightness in that which kept my feet at the edge of the field.

Lano sat beside me in the grass, her white ears pricked forward, watching too. She pressed her flank against my leg without making a sound.

The fallen boundary stake lay ten paces into the field, flat along the furrow, one end dark with old soil. It had been there some time - the ground around it was undisturbed, and the grass that had grown since it fell pressed against its length in a gentle accusation. I looked at it. I did not touch it. Its lying down was not my knowledge to address.

The figure in the rows did not look toward the stake either. She moved as though she had already accounted for it, as though the work she was doing had its own geometry that did not require the stake to be standing.

Light shifted in the barley as she moved. The awns swayed where she had passed and stilled again.

I stayed until the light changed, until the gold in the barley thinned toward gray and the figure had moved to the far edge of the rows and become shadow. The stake lay where it was. Lano stood when I turned to go, and we walked back along the road in the quiet.

The field did not need my presence recorded. I had been there; that was enough.

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