Dream d3557-s: The Seedbed Already Turned

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to the walled garden later than I had planned, and found the gate already ajar.

The evening light was low and flat, angling across the stone wall so that everything threw a long thin shadow east. Inside, a figure was crouched at the far end of a raised bed, working soil with both hands, pressing and smoothing in slow passes. I stopped at the entrance. The gate was open, not to invite me, just open.

The walls were old, mortared stone with moss in the low courses and a few dried climbing stems still clinging to the south face. The beds were divided by narrow paths of packed earth, and several of them showed fresh turning. Not the whole garden, just two beds near the back corner, the soil dark where it had been worked and pale at the edges where it had not.

A loose glass pane leaned against the interior wall to my left, close to the gate. The glass was wavy the way old glass is, thicker at the bottom edge, and it caught the low light in a way that made the wall behind it look doubled. Whoever had left it there had left it carefully: braced at an angle, not propped flat, as though set down mid-task and not yet returned to. I looked at it and did not touch it.

I stayed at the opening and watched the figure work. There was no conversation between us. The sound was the soft give of soil and, once, the scrape of a tool handle against the wooden edge of the bed.

At the far end of the garden, a single crow was perched on top of the opposite wall. It was watching the figure, or watching something below the wall, I could not tell. It did not move while I was there.

The dated sheets from the previous road were where they had been left. I did not go near them. The notebook was not out. Nothing was being retrieved or consulted.

When the figure paused and sat back on their heels to look at what they had done, I understood that arriving here at all was enough for tonight. I did not need to enter to have been present at the beginning. The glass pane would still be there tomorrow, and so would the work, and so would I.

I stood at the gate until the light shifted to grey, then I left the garden to itself.

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