The Binding

The girl held the small book in both hands and turned it over, searching for the place where the pages became one. “How does it stay together,” she asked, “when every page wants to fall on its own?”

Nyra set down her trowel and wiped the soil from her fingers before she took the book. “The binding holds them,” she said. “A thread runs through the spine, under the paper, where you cannot see it. That thread is what turns a stack of leaves into a thing you can carry.”

She opened the cover and showed the girl the faint ridges along the inner edge, the small valleys where the thread drew the folded sheets close. “Here,” Nyra said, “and here. The maker gathered the pages in groups, folded them, and sewed each group to the next. A book is sewn the way a garden is tied to its stakes, so the weight does not pull it apart.”

The girl ran her thumb along the spine and frowned. “Then the binding holds everything,” she said. Nyra shook her head and closed the book gently in the girl’s lap. “It holds the pages,” she said. “It cannot hold the morning we are reading in, or the smell of the wet rows outside, or the way you are listening now. The thread keeps the paper. The rest is ours to keep.”

They sat a while with the book between them, and the girl pressed her hand flat on the closed cover as if to feel the hidden thread. “I will remember the thread,” she said. Nyra smiled and reached again for her trowel. “Remember the rest too,” she said. “The binding does its part. We do ours.”