How the Ground Keeps the Rain

The girl paused at the end of the row and said, almost to herself, that she had let an hour pass yesterday without setting down a line of it, and now she could not find where it had gone. Nyra straightened from the bed she was thinning and listened without hurry. “I meant to keep it,” the girl said. “But I gave it no page, and when I reach for it now my hand closes on nothing.”

Nyra looked at her a moment, then out over the wet beds where the morning’s watering had already gone down into the soil. “There is a way of keeping that is not like the page,” she said. “You have been taught only the one kind so far, so it troubles you when a thing will not sit still to be found.”

“Look at the earth after rain,” Nyra went on. “It holds nothing you could point to. No pool stands on top for you to dip a finger in. The water goes down out of reach, and yet the whole field is darker and richer for it, and every root drinks for days. Ask the field where the rain is and it cannot answer you. It has become the field.”

“Your hour is like that,” she said. “You did not lose it by leaving it off the page. You let it go down into you, the way the earth takes the rain, until you cannot say where the hour ends and you begin. The page is for what would otherwise dry from the top and be gone by evening. What has already soaked through needs no line to hold it. It is holding you.”

The girl went quiet, turning this over. She looked at the book, closed where she had left it, and understood for the first time that it was never meant to carry the whole of a day, only the part that would burn off if she did not catch it. The rest she was carrying already, without weight, the way a watered field carries a season it can no longer name. Nyra had bent again to her thinning, but the girl thought she saw, in the set of her back, that the answer had been a glad one to give.