Dream d3549-s: What the Feet Know

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the light over the reed beds was gray and level, the kind that makes shadows irrelevant. I was standing at the edge of the narrow path, back against an alder trunk, watching.

The plank lay across the soft place where the path narrowed between two walls of reeds. It had been set two nights before, and the pale wood had already taken on the color of the mud below it - washed out, quieted, made ordinary. I had not placed it there alone. The memory of the work was in my hands, not my thoughts.

Someone came along the path from the direction of the water. I did not recognize them. They were moving at the pace of ordinary crossing - neither testing nor hesitating - just heading somewhere on the other side. Their foot met the near edge of the plank. The reed stems at either side did not bend. The boards held flat. Their second foot followed, and then they were across and moving on, already thinking about something else.

I stayed where I was.

A second person came a little after, carrying something at their side. They walked the same way, without ceremony. The plank absorbed the weight and gave it back as forward motion. The reeds remained upright, the stems unbroken, the path intact.

There was a moment when I almost moved forward to check the boards again - to press with my heel, to look at the join where wood met soft earth on the far side. I stayed still instead. The work was being read by feet now, not by me. Nobody looked back toward the alder where I was standing. Nobody asked whether I was watching.

The water alongside the path moved in small dark lines. The reeds clicked once against each other in something that might have been wind. A reed warbler moved through the upper stems and came out on the other side, shaking the seed heads as it went.

I watched two more crossings before the path went quiet again. The plank showed no sign of what had passed over it except a faint darkening at the center, where the most weight had fallen. I did not walk out to examine it. I turned back the way I had come, through the alder shadow, toward the lower field.

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