Dream d3644-s: Three Strokes, Then Silence

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where a hammer rang three times inside Ospreygreen and then stopped. I was still on the approach path when I heard it - the sound moving out through the gate arch and down the slope toward me. My bag hung from one shoulder, worn canvas dark at the strap, and I shifted it to the other side and kept walking.

The gate stood half-open. Not an invitation, not a refusal: the position things find themselves in when people are working and not thinking about gates. I came through it and stopped on the near side of the courtyard.

Workers were moving in the middle distance. Two of them carried a long timber between them, walking in the short coordinated steps that timber requires. A third sat on an upturned bucket with something in her hands - a length of cord, or wire, I could not tell from where I stood. None of them looked up.

I had a question ready. I had prepared it the full length of the path, tested its phrasing in my head, settled on the reasonable form it needed to take. The question was for whoever was in charge of the work being done here, and it concerned the work's condition - what had been completed, what remained. I held it and waited for someone to notice me.

The two with the timber set it down against the far wall. One pressed her foot against its end to seat it. The other moved around to the far side and did something I couldn't see, crouching low, hands busy.

I set my bag down at my feet. The canvas made a soft sound against the flagstones. My question stayed where it was, unanswered not by refusal but by the simple fact that no one had yet heard it.

The woman on the bucket wound her cord around her palm and stood. She turned partly toward me - I thought for a moment she had registered my presence - and then she crossed to where the timber rested and spoke to the two others in a voice too low to carry.

I waited. The light held, late and level. The gate remained behind me at the half-open angle I had found it. Nothing from inside the place confirmed what work had moved or what had stalled. The eight sheets I carried lay folded inside the notebook, and I did not reach for them.

I was on the approach. That was still what I was: approaching. The receiving work, whatever it had become, was on the other side of that activity, unseen.

---