The Sill

The sill of the south window was the warmest ledge in the whole house, and by late morning it held a band of pale autumn light that moved as slowly as honey across the painted wood. Nyra had set a saucer there with three apple seeds drying, and beside it a stub of pencil and a length of garden twine coiled into a loose nest. The window looked out over the beds where the last of the beans had gone brown on their poles. Nothing on the sill was arranged for show. Each thing had drifted there because the sill was where a hand set a thing down and then forgot it until it was needed.

A book, Nyra thought, could hold the name of an apple and the month to sow it, but it could not hold the warmth of the ledge or the way the light leaned. The sill knew things the pages did not. It knew which seeds had been left to dry and which had already gone into the dark soil, and it knew the rough feel of the twine and the smell of pencil shavings. A ledger could record that three seeds waited, yet the record would be a thin and bloodless version of the saucer in the sun.

The girl who came to learn from her liked to stand at the window and move the small things from one end of the sill to the other, making rooms and roads of them, giving the seeds and the twine a life the ledger would never think to grant. Nyra did not stop her. The sill was a kind of page too, she decided, one that any hand could rewrite, and the writing on it was never meant to last beyond the hour. That was the whole gentle use of it.

What the book could do, and the sill could not, was carry a thing forward past the end of the season. The sun would shift south and the warm band would narrow and go, and the saucer would be carried to the kitchen, and the twine would be spent. But the page that said plant these in the thaw would still be there in the dead cold of the year, patient as a sleeping root, ready to wake a hand into work when the ledge itself held only frost.

So the two of them kept their two kinds of memory, the warm and passing one on the ledge and the cool and lasting one in the book, and neither was asked to be the other. Nyra turned the saucer a quarter so the far seeds might dry, and left the rest as it lay. The light would do its slow work without her. The sill would hold the morning for as long as the morning chose to stay, and the book would hold the rest.