The Bed in All Its Hours

The girl had thought she knew the far bed by heart, having weeded it a hundred times. But Nyra brought her out to it at first light, before the sun was over the wall, when the whole bed lay in a flat gray shade and every leaf wore the same dull color. The shapes of the plants had gone soft and low, blurred one into the next, so that she could not have said from the path which row was beans and which was the young kale.

By the middle of the morning the sun had come round, and the same bed was another place. Now the light stood straight down into it, and each leaf threw its own hard little shadow, and the rows sprang apart, sharp and separate. The beans climbed plain to the left and the kale crouched to the right, and every one of them stood clear of its neighbor. The dew had burned away, and the soil between the rows had gone from black to a dry brown.

In the long afternoon the light came slant and yellow from the far side of the wall, and it reached in under the leaves where it had not been before. The undersides of things showed now, the pale backs of the bean leaves, a late flower she had missed at noon, a whole lower story of the bed that the straight light had kept hidden. The same plants stood where they had stood all day, and yet it was a garden she had not met.

She understood, watching it turn through the one day, that no line she could write would ever hold the bed whole. If she set down what she saw at noon she would leave out the gray of the dawn and the gold of the evening. If she caught the evening she would lose the plain noon. A page could keep one hour and only one. But the bed lived in all its hours at once, and that living was the part no writing could carry off.

So she did not try to write the bed that day. She stayed with it instead until the last light went out of it, and let it be larger than any page. What she set down later was small and flat, the height of the beans and the day of the month, the things a page could hold. The rest she left to the bed itself, which kept its own hours far better than she ever could, and asked nothing of her but that she come and look.