The Days the Book Let Pass

A whole week had gone by, and the book held not one new line for it. Nyra stood among the beds in the last of the evening light and thought about that blank stretch. The week had been a good one, even and warm from end to end. The beans came on as they should. The weeds stayed down. Nothing failed and nothing surprised her, and so there had been nothing at all to write.

She thought about what the book did keep. It was loud about trouble. It held the frost that came too early one year and the long row that would not take no matter what she gave it. It kept the morning a fox got in among the young plants, and the season the rain came down until the low ground drowned. The record leaned always toward the wrong and the strange, because those were the days that asked to be set down.

But the long even weeks, when the work went the way work should and the hands knew the way without being told, those left no mark at all. There was nothing in them to warn a later reader of, nothing to puzzle over, nothing that wanted fixing. So the book stayed shut, and the best of the days passed clean through it and were gone.

It seemed a strange unfairness to her. The days she would most want to keep were the very ones the book had no room for. A page could hold a whole failure and lose none of it, but a plain contented morning slid off the page like water off a leaf. The record was a net made to catch only the odd fish, and it let the whole steady river run through.

And yet she did not mind it now as much as she once had. The even weeks did not need keeping in a book, because they kept themselves in her, in the ease of her hands and in an hour like this one. The book could have the trouble and welcome to it. The plain good days she would carry herself, unwritten, for as long as she was here to do the carrying.