Her Way

The new ledger had been hers for the length of a season now, and the girl kept it in her own order. Where the old book ran the weather first and the yield after, she had set the counts to come before the sky, because that was the way her thinking ran. This morning she laid the two books open on the plank table, the full one beside the growing one, and looked from the one to the other.

The pages did not match. The old columns marched in one arrangement and her own in another, and even the figures leaned a little differently under her pen. For a moment the difference sat wrong with her, as though she had let the record wander from its proper form.

The girl lifted her head toward Nyra, who was banking the low fire. “Should I copy the old order,” she asked, “so the two books read as one long keeping, and no one after us has to learn my way?”

Nyra set the poker down and came to stand at her shoulder. “A record only asks to be followed,” she said. “Whoever reads it next will read it slowly, the way you are reading the old one now, and they will find your order soon enough. The book can carry the hand that keeps it. It does not have to look like mine to be true.”

The girl looked once more at the two open books, the old order and her own, and she let her arrangement stand. She dipped her pen and wrote the morning’s count in the place she had chosen for it, first, before the sky. The two books would never look alike, but they held the same care between their covers, and the keeping had quietly taken her shape.