Dream d3574-s: After the First Keeper

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning light lay flat and pale above the pasture, the color of old wheat, and I stood with Lano at the long stone wall while the other figure finished what needed finishing.

The wall stretched away in both directions, muted slate and roughened edge, and the gap near the middle sat open still - two stones on the ground below, where they had slipped in some earlier settling. No one had moved them back. They lay in the short grass with the unhurried patience of things that have nowhere else to be.

The figure on the far side of the gap did not look up. There was only the closing of a bag, the shrug of a coat onto a shoulder, and then the walking away - down the slope toward the lower track, without ceremony, without turning back. The ochre light touched the departing shape until the shape was only outline against the far hedge, and then not even that.

I stayed.

Lano pressed against my ankle and watched the place where the figure had been. Her nose worked at the morning air, reading something I could not. Then she turned and looked toward the far end of the wall, ears up, and I turned with her.

The flock came along the outside of the wall a few minutes later. A shepherd I did not know moved behind them, not hurrying, not looking our way. The sheep flowed past the gap with no particular interest in it - some noses down, some watching the middle distance, their wool carrying the pale light on its surface. The wall held them out of the pasture. That was its work. It did not need to be more than that.

I watched until the flock and the shepherd disappeared around the hillside. The stones still lay in the grass below the gap. The dew on the top of the wall caught the morning and gave it back slowly.

Lano sat down beside me. She put her chin up into the wind.

The place continued. That was what I had stayed to see.

---