Whole As It Is

The two books sat side by side on the table, the old one thick and full, the new one still lean. The girl turned the pages of the old book, then the pages of her own, and a small frown came to her face. The old book ran by weather and sky; her book ran by count. A borrower who had learned to read the one would surely stumble in the other.

The girl set down her pen and looked up. “I could copy the old book over into my order, so the two would match,” she said. “Then no one need ever be lost between them.”

Nyra looked from one book to the other before she answered. “The old book is whole as it is,” she said. “It has held our counts for years in its own shape, and every mark in it is true. To copy it over would be labor spent for no gain, and the copying hand makes its own small errors along the way.”

“Let each book keep the shape it was given,” Nyra went on. “A keeper learns to read any honest record, whatever plan it follows. The reader you fear will manage, as we have managed. What matters is that the marks are true, not that the two agree in how they run.”

The girl looked at the books again, and the frown eased. She let the old book stay as it was and closed her own beside it. Two shapes, she thought, and both of them honest. She set them on the shelf together, the full and the lean, and did not reach for a fresh sheet to begin the needless copying.