A Door Back to the Morning

The girl carried her few entries to Nyra that evening, holding the small book open across both hands as though it might spill. All through the day the work had run ahead of her, and what she had managed to catch of it looked now like the least part of a large and living morning. She wanted to be told that so plain a showing was enough, or else that it was not, and she was half afraid of either answer. Nyra set aside the dried stalks she had been sorting and drew the open book onto her knee.

“It is too bare,” the girl said. “I put down the day, and what went into the ground, and how deep. Nothing of how the light lay across the beds, or how the earth smelled once it was turned, or the way your hands knew where to go without looking. Anyone at all might have written it. It could be any morning in any year.”

Nyra went over the short entries without hurry. “You have set down what was true and let alone what you were not sure of,” she said. “That is no fault in you. A fine telling of a thing you half saw is worth less than a bare one of a thing you saw whole. I have opened old writings so crowded with feeling that I could never find, underneath it, what the keeper had actually done that day.”

“But I want to hold the whole of it,” the girl said. “Not only the bones.” Nyra was quiet a moment. “The whole of it cannot be held,” she said at last. “No hand is quick enough, and the day would not sit still to be copied even if one were. What you keep is a door back to the morning, not the morning itself. A plain word you trust will swing that door open. A fine word you have to doubt will only stick fast in it.”

The girl looked down at the bare lines and tried to see them as doors rather than as failures. It was not easy; they still seemed thin against the long morning they stood in for. But she thought that perhaps thinness she could trust was better than fullness she could not, and that the light and the smell and the sure movement of another woman’s hands were not lost so much as left to live where they had happened. She closed the small book softly, and for the first time did not wish the day’s few words were other than what they were.