A Fair Division

The spring work carried on past that first bed, and each evening the girl sat to her own book with the day’s rows to set down. She wrote them the way she had settled on, one line to a bed: the number sown, the marker set, and no word for the weather or the shape of the sky. Her pages stayed lean where the older book ran full.

One evening she stopped with her pen above the page and turned to Nyra, who was banking the fire. “If I only keep the counts,” she asked, “will they be enough to tell me the year, when I am old and reading back? Your book holds the rains and the frosts. Mine holds none of that.”

Nyra set down the poker and came to look at the two books lying open beside one another. “The count holds what was done,” she said. “How many went into the ground, and where. That is a true thing, and it does not fade.” She rested a finger by the girl’s line.

“The weather lives in my book,” she went on, “and the doing lives in yours, and a keeper who has both reads the whole of a year between them. You need not carry the sky as well. Keep your pages as spare as you please. What one leaves out, the other has already held.”

The girl looked at the two books a moment longer, the full one and the lean one, and then she wrote her single line and let it stand. Outside the last light went from the garden. Two books lay on the table, and between them the young season was already set down and safe.