The Blank the Season Kept

By the turn of the cold months the garden had gone down to bare ground and a few frames of dead vine, and there was little to do but the little that had to be done. The girl carried her book out of habit, the way she carried it through the growing season, and sat on the step to fill it. She opened to the next clean page and found she had nothing to set there. The day had held only small tending, a check of the stored jars, a walk along rows that asked for nothing. Her hand waited over the paper and the paper stayed white.

At first this felt like a fault in her. A keeper of a book, she thought, should have something to keep, and here the season had handed her a blank she did not know what to do with. She turned back through the crowded pages of summer, the columns thick with counts and doings, and the run of empty leaves ahead of them looked like a place where she had let the record fall. She thought she ought to find something, however small, to carry the days across the gap.

Nyra was at some low task among the frames, tying back what the wind had loosened, moving through the resting garden without hurry. The girl watched her go from one thing to the next and saw that Nyra did almost nothing, and that the almost nothing was the whole of the work the season asked. The ground under the frost was not idle. It was doing the slow labor of rest, holding its strength down where no page could follow it. Nothing in that was a fault. It was only the year keeping its own quiet.

So the girl understood that the book should carry the fallow as plainly as it carried the harvest. An honest record had thin stretches in it, the same as a year had, and to crowd them with anything would be to tell a lie about the season. She let the pages stay as they were. The blank run was not a gap in her keeping. It was the keeping of a season that had asked her to be still.

She thought that some later winter she would turn to these pages and read the rest that was written in their whiteness, the plain word of a time when nothing had needed saying. For now she closed the book over the empty leaves and set her hand flat on the cover. The garden went on resting under the cold. She let the year have its silence, and let herself have it too, and did not take up the pen.