Rescued From a Failing Corner

Near the back of the oldest book, one page had grown soft at its lower corner. Some winter long before either of them, damp had reached in under the cover and settled there, and the paper had never wholly dried. Nyra had known of the spot for years and had let it be, a small ruin at the margin of an otherwise sound volume.

Now the corner was thinning toward lace. The words along that edge were still there to be read, an old note of a season of heavy rain and a poor yield of beans, but the paper beneath them had begun to give way. It would not hold through another wet winter. Whatever it carried, it would carry only a little longer.

So Nyra opened the current book to a clean page and set the old one beside it. She wrote the entry forward, all of it, the date and the weight and the loss and the plain note of the rain that had caused it. She did not weigh one part against another or hold back what seemed small. She set down the whole of it into a book that would outlast the failing corner.

The girl watched from across the table. The damaged corner had been choosing for years, letting the damp take a letter here and a letter there, deciding without judgment what would remain. Nyra had taken that choosing back into her own hand. She would carry the words on whole, before the paper thinned to nothing and settled the matter for her.

When it was done she laid the old book back on its shelf, the worn corner unchanged, the old entry still faintly there. It stood now as a record of its own long wearing, honest about what time had done to it. But the words it had held were somewhere sounder, written forward into a page that would keep them a while yet.