The Path the Feet Wrote

The rain had gone off by morning, and the beds lay dark and open to the light. Nyra went out early with the girl behind her, and the ground gave a little under their boots where the water had not yet drained. All winter the garden had run to weed and rough grass, so that the beds and the bare rows between them had blurred into one green field. But the paths held. Down the middle of each one the earth was packed and shining, worn clean of any growth, while the weeds crowded up to the edges and stopped there.

The girl had walked those paths a hundred times without once looking at them. Now she stood at the head of the long one and saw it plain. No one had laid it down or set a marker for it. No stone edged it and no line named it. It had simply come, over the years, wherever the feet had gone often enough to keep the green from taking hold.

She followed it with her eye and saw that it was not straight. It bent toward the far corner where the sick plants always stood, the corner that asked for water and watching more than any other. And it thinned away to almost nothing along the beds by the wall, the ones that carried themselves and wanted little. Where the work had been heavy the track ran wide and deep. Where the work had been light the ground had nearly closed over again.

Nyra knew the whole of it without needing to read it. The book on her shelf held what she had chosen to set down, the notes and the dates and the counts she had thought worth keeping. The path held something she had never once meant to keep at all. Her feet had marked it while her mind was on the beds, day after day, and it lay there now as a record of the doing itself, made with no hand to guide it and no writing of any kind.

The girl saw that such a record could not lie the way a written line could. A page might claim more care than the hands had truly given. But the ground wore only where the weight came down, and it wore most where she had come back the most. She walked the deep track to the far corner, and the going of it told her, plainer than any entry, where the garden had needed her the whole year long.