What Would Not Come When Called

The girl found Nyra among the bean rows the next morning, a question she had carried since the day before pressing at her. The dew had not yet dried on the leaves, and the pods hung cool and heavy where she brushed against them. She had meant to ask it plainly, and instead she stood turning her trowel over in her hands. Nyra glanced up and waited, the way she did when she saw a thought working its way toward speech.

“How do you choose,” the girl said at last. “When you sit with your book of an evening, how do you know which parts of a day belong on the page, and which you can leave to yourself to hold?” Nyra straightened and pressed a hand to the small of her back.

“I used to think I did the choosing,” she said. “Now I think the day mostly chooses for me. Some things you could set down or leave off, and it makes no difference, they stay by you either way. But a few will fall away if you do not tie them to a word. The date the frost came. How many rows of the early peas. Which corner the beds went to mud after the long rain. Those I write, because a year on I will want them, and they will not come when I call. The rest I let be. A book that tried to hold every last thing would only buckle beneath its own weight, and in time you would come to dread the opening of it.”

The girl weighed this against her own days. “So the book is for the things that would leave you,” she said slowly, “and everything else you keep because it will not leave.” Nyra smiled at that. “Nearer than I could have put it myself. You write down what your own two hands cannot be trusted to carry. The rest you carry freely, and it costs you nothing to hold.”

They bent to the beans again and worked awhile without more words. The girl turned it over as she pulled the weeds from around the stems. She would write down only what would not answer when she called it, the dates and the tallies and the small facts too slight to summon back on their own. Everything else she would let live in her as it pleased, coming when it chose to come, needing no page to keep it. The evening book, she saw now, was no wall thrown up against the losing of a day. It was only a short record of the few things too shy to answer to her, set down so that they, too, might be waiting there when she went to look.