Only to Us

The two books lay open on the table between them in the last of the light, the old one thick with years of weather, the new one lean and quick with its counts. The girl looked from one page to the other, and then, oddly, toward the door. She seemed to be weighing something she had not yet found the words for.

“If someone from another house came in and opened these,” she said, “could they read them? Would they know what any of it meant?”

Nyra set her cup down and looked at the two books for a while before she spoke. “They could open them,” she said. “The pages would let anyone in. But reading is not the same as opening. A count here is a morning we both stood in. A short line there is a frost that took the young beans. Someone who was not here would see numbers and marks and nothing at all behind them.”

“That is not a thing to guard,” she went on. “The books are no secret. If a neighbor wished to look, I would hand them over gladly. Only they would find the record plain and the sense of it gone, the way a house looks smaller once the people who filled it have walked out the door.”

“So they are for us,” the girl said, and it was not quite a question. Nyra nodded and drew both books a little closer, the thick one and the thin. “For us, and for whoever keeps the garden after us and cares to learn our hand. To anyone else they are only paper. That is enough. A record does not have to be read by the whole world to be true.” The girl looked at the open pages as though seeing, for the first time, how much of them lived outside the ink.