Where the Ink Grew Thin

Nyra took down an old volume from the low shelf and set it on the table by the window. The girl came to stand at her elbow. Some pages had held their marks for many autumns, and some had not. Where a hand had once pressed hard, the letters were still dark; where it had passed light, the years had taken the words back into the paper.

Nyra turned to a page from a season long before the girl was born. Half of it remained plain and firm, a row of counted baskets and the date beside them. The other half had thinned to a pale ghost, a shape of writing with the meaning gone out of it. The girl leaned close and could not make the faint part speak again, however she tilted it toward the light.

Nyra did not seem troubled by the loss. She ran one finger down the marks that had stayed and let it rest on those that had gone. The ink that survived was not the ink of the grandest days, she showed by pointing; it was the ink laid down slowly, with a full pen and a settled hand. What had been written in haste, in a thin and hurried stroke, was the first to leave.

So the page had made its own choosing, she let the girl understand, without any keeper to decide it. The years had read the book once more and held the marks that were set down surest, and returned the rest to blankness. It was not the loudest entries that had lasted, only the most firmly given. The girl looked at her own small book and thought about the weight she put behind each stroke.

Nyra closed the old volume and set her palm flat on its cover for a moment. The lesson, the girl saw, was not to mourn the faded half but to learn from it. If a thing was worth trusting to a page, it was worth the slow full stroke that the years would honor. She would write, from now on, as though time itself were the reader that decided what would stay.