A Reason to Do Nothing

The spring came down wet, week after week, so the barrel by the door stayed full and the beds asked nothing of the well. On a gray morning Nyra took up her pen and set a single line in the ledger that puzzled the girl, for it seemed to say she had done a thing by doing none of it.

The girl leaned close and read the line twice. “You have written that you did not water,” she said. “But if you did not water, there is nothing there to keep. A page left plain would say as much.”

Nyra shook her head. “A plain page says I forgot, or that I was away, or that the season slipped past me. This line says I chose. The rain did the labor these hands would have done, and I stood aside on purpose.”

“Some winter a keeper will read a dry spring beside this wet one,” Nyra went on, “and wonder why the well went untouched in the year it poured. Leave the page quiet, and that keeper reads carelessness. A choice belongs in the book as plainly as a task. What I held back is the garden’s story too.”

The girl went to her own book and thought a while. Then she wrote that she had let the far row stand unweeded, not from tiredness but because she wished to watch how it fared beside the tended ground. Reading it back, she saw that a page could hold a decision as surely as a deed, and that the truest entry was sometimes the one telling why her hands had rested.