Two Springs on the Page

The plum by the gate had broken into bud overnight, and the girl found it before the dew was off. She came back to the door with the news bright in her face and said, “It has come early this year. I am sure of it.” Nyra looked up from the seedlings she was setting out and did not answer at once. She only wiped her hands, went to the shelf, and took down the book, and then she walked out to the tree with it under her arm as though the two of them, the book and the plum, had an appointment to keep.

She turned the pages back to the spring before and set her finger on the line where she had written the day this same tree first showed its buds. Then she looked up at the branches, thick now with the small green swellings, and back down to the page. “You are right,” she said. “But you did not know how right. Last year I wrote it down on the ninth day after the thaw. This is the fifth. So it is not early by a feeling. It is early by four days, and four days is a thing you can hold in your hand.”

The girl came and looked at the two marks, the old one in the faded line and the tree standing green above them both. She had been certain the plum was ahead of itself, but her certainty had no size to it. It had been only a warmth, a sense that the year was hurrying. The page took that warmth and gave it edges. Early was no longer a mood. It was four days, counted from the thaw, the same thaw both springs had waited on.

“A single year cannot see itself,” Nyra said, closing the book on her thumb to keep the place. “It has nothing to stand beside. You feel that a thing is soon or late, but the feeling drifts, and by summer you will swear it was always so. It takes two years, both set down, before you have a measure at all. One is a guess. Two is the start of knowing. And every year you add lays another rule beside the last.”

The girl took the pen when it was offered and wrote this spring under the one before, the fifth day beneath the ninth, so that the two stood one above the other like the marks a parent pencils on a doorframe. Now there were two springs on the page, and a third, she saw, would tell her whether the plum was truly running ahead or only wandering, the way a year will. She closed the book gently. It was, she thought, a place for setting years side by side, so that none of them had to stand alone and guess.