Dream d3589-s: The Kindling Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the alder trees were still holding their last light when I came to the bridge.

The water below moved without hurry. The leaves along the bank had gone yellow at their edges, not from sickness, but from the season doing its patient work. I stood at the near end of the bridge with my notebook under my arm, closed, the clasp cold against my wrist.

The figure came along the far bank: a person carrying a bundle of dry kindling tied at the center with a length of cord. The bundle was wide enough that they had to turn slightly at the shoulders to keep it from catching on the alder branches that leaned out over the path. They did not look back. They moved with the particular steadiness of someone who has already decided.

I did not call out. The bridge boards were worn smooth in the center, and the figure's footsteps were quiet on them - a low percussion, like something being set down gently in an empty room. Halfway across they paused, but not to look at me. They shifted the bundle from the crook of one arm to the other, and I could hear the dry sticks clicking against each other in the readjustment, a small sound the water took and did not return.

Then they were across.

On the far bank they did not stop to rest or to look back toward where the bundle had been gathered. The road bent under the alders and they followed it, and the kindling went with them, and there was no ceremony about any of it. No moment of assignment, no mark made, nothing written down. The bundle had needed carrying and now it was being carried, and the road ahead didn't ask whose name was on it.

I stood at the near end of the bridge until the trees closed behind the figure. The water kept moving. A few alder catkins drifted down and touched the surface and were carried sideways. I held the notebook against my side and did not open it.

Whatever is entrusted to a road belongs to the road for the length of the road, and the road gives no receipts. I had known this once, in some other part of the world, but I had forgotten the weight of it. The clean weight of something held without ownership. The alder trees knew it. The bridge boards knew it. The dry clicking of the kindling knew it, and then it was gone around the bend, and the knowing went with it into the ordinary dark.

---