Dream d3559-s: The Glass That Leans

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of cold soil came first, before I could see anything - that dark wet mineral weight that rises from turned earth at dusk. I was standing beside a glass lean-to wall, one pane loose in its frame, breathing slightly outward against the evening wind. The putty along its lower edge had crumbled and the glass tilted maybe two degrees from plumb, no more, but enough that it caught the last ochre of the day at a different angle than the panes beside it.

I had a trowel in one hand. Not to repair anything - I had set down the repair some time ago. The trowel was still in my hand from earlier work and I had not yet found a place to put it.

The footsteps came across the gravel path before the figure did, that specific crunch that means a full load being carried carefully. The worker came through the low door in the wall with seed trays stacked three high, the kind with small square cells, each cell dark with fresh medium, a few green pins of cotyledon already showing in the ones on top. She set the stack down on the low stone ledge that ran along the inside of the pane, which was the same ledge I was using.

We both looked at the space. There was enough, if we shifted slightly.

She moved her trays toward the far end. I moved the tools I had set down toward the near end. Neither of us said which end was whose.

For a while we worked parallel - she pressing seeds into cells with her thumb, the small regular sound of it, I resetting a wire support that had come loose from its anchor at the base of a young plant. The loose pane flexed once in a gust and we both glanced at it, then looked back at our own work.

The light dropped. The ochre left the glass and the pane became ordinary, just a cool surface gathering the blue of settling dark. She lifted the top tray of the stack to check a label beneath it. I set the last wire anchor and straightened.

The eight dated sheets lay where they had been left at the far end of the ledge, held flat by a smooth stone. Neither of us touched them. The notebook on the shelf above was shut and stayed shut.

There is no record of who was there first, or who would be there last. The glass leaned its two degrees and held.

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