Remembered Twice

The thaw came late and slow, and one morning the ground gave underfoot at last. The girl brought the winter bundle down from its high corner and loosened the cloth, and both records lay open in her lap, the full old volume and her own lean one, ready for the work ahead.

She turned to the first bare page of her own book and paused. “Which of us should set down the first line of the year?” she asked. For as long as she could remember, the old book had opened each spring, and it felt strange to start without it going before her.

Nyra looked at the girl and then at the pair in her lap. “You should begin,” she said. “Your book holds the counts we depend on now, and a keeper who has earned her place should be the one to open the year. I will come after in mine, the way I have always come after the weather.”

“There is no waste in keeping both,” she went on. “A year set down twice, once by its weather and once by its counts, is a year remembered far more surely than one kept alone. Two of us will catch what one of us would let slip. Let the garden have both keepers, and both of their books.”

The girl dipped her pen and wrote the first line of the year across the top of her clean page, the date and the small first task of the thaw. Beside her, Nyra turned the old volume to its own new leaf. The work had started again, and this time it had started in the girl’s hand.