When to Name the Weather

The girl turned back through the older pages and found a puzzle in them. Some entries told her the weather and some told her nothing of the sky at all. She carried the book to Nyra and set her finger on the difference.

“Why does this one say the frost held past the thaw,” the girl asked, “while the entry below it says only that the beans went in?” Nyra looked a long while before she answered.

“The weather goes into the record when it did something to the work,” Nyra said. “When it broke a root or saved a seedling or told you why a whole bed came to nothing. On a plain morning the sky is only the morning, and a reader does not need it named.”

“So I leave it out,” the girl said slowly, “unless the reader after me would be lost without it.” Nyra nodded at her. “You keep the book for whoever reads it later. Name the weather she would need to understand the row, and let the rest of the sky stay off the page.”

The girl went back to her own book and read her last few entries with a new eye. To two of them she added a short note about the wind and the cold snap that had bent the young shoots. The others she let stand as they were, ordinary and clear, and she understood now that a bare sky in the record was a choice and not a thing she had missed.