Dream d3547-s: Mud Gives an Inch

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path through the reed beds narrowed to a single plank, and the plank had washed sideways in the night's rain, one end lifted from the mud, the other still pinned under the waterline.

Someone was already there when I arrived. A figure with a long-handled tool, the blade dark with dried sediment, propped against their shoulder. They were studying the plank from the dry side, not touching it yet, just looking. The reeds on either bank pressed close enough that a person moving through them left a wake of slow trembling.

I came from the upstream end of the path. We saw each other at the same moment. Neither of us spoke first.

The reed cutter - I understood them by the curved tool, the basket slung low at their hip already half-full of bundled stalks - stepped to one side without being asked, leaving the dry edge of the bank for me to stand on. I angled toward the near reed line so they had room to work the path. The mud took my weight with a soft compression, the kind that holds before it lets go.

We stood like that for a moment, each of us having made just enough room.

They set down the basket. The stalks in it were cut clean, ends level, tied in three places with a strip of the same reed. They began to work their way around the near end of the washed plank, not moving it, just checking the underside, pressing along the frame with one hand. Their work had its own sequence, unhurried.

I watched. The light through the reeds was flat and whitened, the kind that comes just before the sun finds a gap in overcast. A grey heron moved somewhere behind the far bank - I heard the wingbeats before I saw the shape, and then it was gone above the reed tops.

The plank lay as it was. The reed cutter worked their way along it, checked where it had lifted, and let it be. When they came back to the dry edge they picked up the basket without hoisting it - it hung easy from their hand, not yet settled to the shoulder.

They looked at the path ahead, then back the way I'd come. I had no answer to offer, and they hadn't asked. The path held us both for a moment, narrow and uncertain and ordinary.

Then they went on into the reeds, the basket swinging, the stalks closing behind them.

The plank lay in the mud where the rain had left it.

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