Dream d3529-s: Neither Name on the Stake

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the evening light lay in long strips across the dry field, and I was standing near the west road without knowing how I had come to be there.

The soil was pale where it had been turned, darker in the rows where the roots still held. I could hear, before I saw them, the sound of someone working - a rhythmic scrape, the soft knock of a tool against packed earth. The field keeper stood near a place where a wooden stake had fallen sideways across the boundary line, its tip pointing at nothing in particular. She had set her tools to one side and was looking at the stake the way a person looks at something they have thought about for several minutes without deciding.

Then from the next field over, a figure came walking. He carried a mallet and a short-handled spade, the ordinary tools of that kind of place. He did not hurry. He did not announce himself. He simply came to where the stake was and looked at it the same way she had, and then he set his mallet down in the grass and stood beside her.

They did not speak for a long time.

When they did begin to work, it was without discussion of who would do which part. One steadied the stake while the other pressed the earth back around its base. The mallet struck twice, a sound that carried flat across the field and dissolved in the distance. Neither moved to claim the tool when it was done.

Lano had come with me without my noticing. She stood just at my shoulder, her nose working at something in the cooling air, her tail still. She watched the two of them the way she sometimes watched things she had already understood. I did not move closer. I did not offer to help or to record what I had seen. The eight sheets from the previous road lay where I had left them; the notebook stayed shut.

The stake stood upright in the ground now. Both figures gathered their tools. They did not divide the field. They did not lay a hand on the boundary to name it. One went back toward where she had come from, and one went back toward where he had come from, and the field held the ordinary evening between them like something that had always been there.

Lano pressed against my leg once, then moved ahead on the path.

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