A Book of Her Own

At the close of the season the girl set down her pen and looked at what she had done. All through the long weeks she had been adding her own marks into the corners of the older ledger, a slant here, a short line there, wherever a page left her room. Now she saw how her hand crowded against another hand, and she was not sure her marks belonged among them at all. She turned back through the volume and found the account already whole without her, and she wondered whether she had only been leaning against work that was not hers to touch.

When Nyra came in from the beds the girl asked her plainly. “Should I go on writing in your book,” she said, “or is there a place that is only mine?” She kept her voice even, though the question had been sitting in her since the first frost.

Nyra set down the basket and thought before she answered. “The ledger holds the garden,” she said at last, “and the garden belongs to whoever tends it after us, so that book must stay plain and shared. But you have been seeing things I do not write. The way a bird waits at the fence before the seed goes down. The hour the light first reaches the far row. Those are yours, and they want a book of their own.”

She reached to the shelf and brought down a fresh volume, its pages bare, and set it in the girl’s hands. “This one answers to no one but you,” Nyra told her. “Put in it what you are still asking, not only what you are sure of. A book of your own can carry a question for as long as it takes, and no other reader will fault you for leaving the answer open.”

The girl opened the cover and smoothed the first blank page. She wrote one line, small and careful, about the bird at the fence, and then she stopped and let it stand alone. On the table the two books lay side by side, the old one heavy with the account of the ground, the new one holding a single noticing that the old one had no room to keep.