Every Volume Weighed

The old room was to be given over to the drying of beans, so every volume and tool had to leave it. Nyra stood in the doorway at first light and looked at the full length of the wall, at the years of pages stacked from floor to hand. Then she took up an empty basket and began.

The new place was smaller, a narrow set of pockets built into the wall by the window, and it could not hold all that the old room had held. So each thing she lifted became a question answered by her hands alone. She weighed a volume, turned it, and either set it in the basket for the window or laid it in a second pile beside the cold hearth.

The girl came in and watched the two piles grow. The basket for the window took the records still in use, the tallies of the beds and the pages a later season would need. The pile by the hearth took the volumes whose work was long done, the counts of gardens gone to grass, the notes no living hand would read again.

What struck the girl was how sure the sorting was, and how it was nothing like the daily keeping. In the keeping, every page had earned its place by being written; here, each had to earn it again by being needed. The move asked a harder thing than the pen ever had, and Nyra answered it item by item, without a sound.

When the basket was full and the hearth pile waited for its own slow end, the girl looked at her own thin stack of pages by the door. She drew it toward her and began to weigh each one in her hand, keeping the few and setting the rest aside. Nyra watched her choose, gave a small nod, and let the quiet stand.