Dream d3728-s: Chalk on the Left Side

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I reached the workroom in Rowanbrook after a long stretch of road, my bag heavy against my side, and stopped in the doorway because two people were already inside.

One of them sat at the long table with a length of cord in her hands, not doing anything with it yet, just holding it across her palms to feel its condition. The other was standing at the far wall with a piece of chalk, making a small mark level with a shelf edge, then stepping back to look.

The bag was the practical question I had been carrying since the day before. What it held was accounted for in my head, but not anywhere else. Above the window, the eight sheets I had left behind were still there, the same stack, the same slight lean to the right. The notebook beside them was shut.

The worker at the wall made a second chalk mark, higher. Then returned to the first and drew a clean circle around it.

I understood the logic. A height had shifted, or needed to be held in place for whoever came next, and the mark was the cleanest way to do it. No ledger needed. Just the wall and the chalk and enough light to read by.

I crossed the room and crouched at a low cabinet I had not opened before. The handle was worn smooth. Inside: folded cloths, a small hammer, a coil of wire in a tin. A careful arrangement, nothing placed without reason, none of it mine.

The cord worker set her length down on the table. Not rolled, just laid flat.

I stayed crouched a moment longer, not taking anything, reading the cabinet the way you read a room that tells you what work came before yours. Then I stood, moved the bag away from the doorway so it would not catch on anyone passing, and waited.

The chalk worker wrote a number under the second mark. Small, but readable across the room.

That was the response. Not the one I had been planning on the road, but the one already happening here, which turned out to be the same thing, arrived at by different means.

---