The Order of the Shelf

The girl found Nyra with every book down from the shelf, laid in a long row along the table, so that the bare wood of the shelf showed for the first time in years. “You have emptied it,” the girl said. Nyra only nodded and set her hand flat on the boards.

“I am putting them back in a better order,” Nyra said. “For a long time they have sat in the order I happened to fill them, oldest at one end and newest at the other. That is the order of my own life, not the order of a hand that comes looking in a hurry.”

She lifted the book of failed and thin seasons, the one a keeper reaches for when a crop sours or a bed will not wake, and set it at the very front, low and near the edge where a hand falls without thinking. “This one should be closest,” she said. “Not because it is dearest, but because the day you need it, you will not have time to search.”

The books of good years and proud harvests she placed further along, higher and harder to reach. “These we open when there is time to sit,” she said. “Their order can be slow. A shelf is a kind of record too. It sets down, without a single mark, what you fear enough to keep near and what you love enough to climb for.”

The girl walked the length of the table, reading the new order before it was set. Then she reached past the proud years and moved the thin ones a finger closer to the edge. Nyra watched her do it and did not undo the small change. “You have the sense of it,” she said. “The order is not mine to hold forever. It belongs to whoever will reach for these after us.”