The Twine

The ball of twine lived in the shed on a nail by the door, and it had grown soft and furred with use, so that Nyra could feel the age of it in her palm. She cut a length with the small knife and carried it out to the row of beans, where the young stalks were beginning to lean away from their stakes and reach into the open air. The girl followed her into the green rows and watched her loop the twine once around a stalk and once around the wood, loose enough that the stalk could still thicken through the summer.

“Why not tie it tight,” the girl asked, “so it cannot fall at all?”

Nyra knotted the end and sat back on her heels to look at her work. “Tie a thing too tight and you hold it in the shape it had this morning,” she said, “and a bean does not want the shape it had this morning. The twine is not here to keep the stalk still. It is here to keep it from falling while it learns to stand.”

“The book on the sill is bound the same way,” Nyra said, nodding toward the house. “The thread down its spine does not hold the words, for the words are already held by nobody but the reader. The thread only keeps the pages near each other long enough for a hand to find them in order. Cut it, and you do not lose the story, but you lose the gathering of it.”

The girl ran the loose end of the twine between her fingers and looked down the long row of leaning stalks, each one held and not held, each one climbing past the knot that had steadied it. “So the twine is the kindest when it is almost loose,” she said, and Nyra, coiling the rest of the length back around her hand, said that this was the whole of it, and that a binding was only a promise to let go at the right time.