Dream d3578-s: When the Door Moves True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the end of the road where it opens onto the threshold. The door hung in its frame, catching at the bottom, and two people I recognized without naming had already laid out what they needed.

One crouched at the sill with a plane, the kind with a wooden body worn smooth at the cheeks. The other stood close with a tin pail, water beading on the outside in the cool morning air. Neither spoke much. The one with the plane drew it forward once along the wood, then lifted and looked at the curl of shaving that rose and fell from the blade.

I watched from a few steps back. The road behind me was quiet. Ahead, the light came through the open frame at an angle that caught the grain in the sill, pale and close, the wood still damp from where water had been brushed onto it with a cloth.

The one carrying the pail set it down and crouched beside the first, tracing the mark the door had left, a faint scuff across the width of the sill where it had dragged. They did not measure with instruments. The measurement was the mark itself, the place where wood met wood and stopped short.

The plane went forward again, a single pass. Then the door was lifted in its frame, just a little, and let settle back. It moved. Not freely, but honestly, the way a thing fits when it is allowed to fit rather than forced.

The shavings lay on the floor of the threshold in a small heap. The one with the pail reached in and drew out a wet cloth, wiped the surface, and the wood came up with that clean particular smell of opened grain. I held it in my throat for a moment.

Neither of them looked at me. I had not come to help and they had not asked. The eight sheets were where I had left them, folded, and I did not reach for them. The notebook stayed in my coat.

What the dream left was not the finished door but the pause between the second pass of the plane and the test, the two of them crouching together at the sill in the daylight, looking at what was enough.

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