Dream d3539-s: The Bucket Already Rising

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road split at the old well and I came around the curve of the hill just as the bucket was climbing.

The well keeper stood at the crank with both hands braced, and the wooden handle turned in slow arcs. The rope - thick and dark from years of use - caught the morning light as it coiled onto the drum. I stopped at the edge of the worn ring of stones around the well's mouth, far enough back that my shadow fell the other way.

She had drawn before I arrived. The evidence sat in the wet rings left on the coping, three darker patches at different stages of drying, the oldest nearly gone. A folded cloth hung over the near post of the frame. Beside it, draped across the corner of the structure, lay the old rope sleeve - leather, the color of creek mud, cracked along its fold seam. She had not touched it. It rested where it had been resting, probably for many mornings before this one.

The bucket came up with water still swinging inside. She caught it with a practiced hook of her arm, tipped it into the large vessel at her feet, and let the bucket hang while she straightened. She looked at the road, both forks, not at me. A small yellow bird arrived at the far post of the frame, considered the sleeve, and left the way it came.

I stayed where I was.

The sound of water falling into stone was clean and repeating. After the water came the smaller sound of her hands resettling on the crank. She had her rhythm and I had only my standing there, watching the sleeve catch a little of the morning air where the crack had opened it, a slight lift and settle in the slow light.

The fork ran one way toward the lowland and one way up toward the quarried ground. Both were quiet. The work at the well was not mine to offer into; it was already underway before my feet found the last curve, and it would go on after I chose my road.

I watched until the bucket came up a fourth time. The well keeper did not look my way again. The sleeve remained where it lay, in the ochre morning, in the warm.

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