Dream d3596-s: Placed in Plain Sight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a willow basket passed through the gaps between the orchard trees, disappearing behind each trunk and coming into view again. Fallen apples lay half pressed into the clay along the track; beyond them, two wheel marks ran side by side. I was standing at the orchard's margin. The trees ran back in rows into a muted afternoon, their branches still carrying the last of the year's apples, and the track between them was pale and dry.

Two figures were on it, not far from where I stood.

One carried a wide willow basket, low and flat, the kind made for a season's worth of seed fruit. His pace was measured, the weight visible in the slope of his shoulders and the way each foot found the ground. He moved toward the other, who waited off the track in the grass at the orchard's edge, her hands loose at her sides. She did not come to meet him. She let him come.

He stopped. He set the basket down on the track at a point that was neither his side nor hers - a middle distance, a deliberate placing. The basket settled into the clay without tilting. Both of them looked at it.

I watched them look.

No words. No gesture of acknowledgment beyond the look itself, which was long enough to be a kind of agreement. Then she stepped forward and gripped the basket's handles and lifted. The weight transferred. He watched her lift it without moving to help or to hold.

That was the handoff. It required nothing more than it contained.

The afternoon light did not change. Nobody opened anything, wrote anything, reached for anything that wasn't the basket. I stayed beside the last tree. Across the track, the receiver lowered her elbows to settle the weight; the empty-handed carrier watched until the basket was steady. Between them lay the short stretch of pale clay it had crossed, and in the wicker lay the apples - ochre-skinned, rust-flecked, dull with the particular dullness of fruit meant for seed and not for eating. What had been carried was now in different hands. Both of them had watched it cross over, and I had watched it too, and there was nothing in that to correct or to direct.

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