The Span

The old footbridge spanned the stream at the foot of the garden, and Nyra walked the girl out to stand upon it. The planks were grey with weather, the water beneath them quick and brown with the turning of autumn. From the middle you could see the whole of the garden at once, the rows and the beds and the shed with its leaning door.

In the book, Nyra had once drawn the bridge as a single line, arching from one bank to the other. The girl had thought it too plain, and she had been right to think so. A line cannot carry the weight of a person, nor the sound of water, nor the way the whole garden gathers itself when seen from the middle of a span.

Nyra told the girl that the book kept no bridges, only the fact of them. It could hold the name of the stream and the year the planks were laid, but not the give of the wood underfoot, nor the cold that rose up off the moving water.

The girl wondered aloud what the far bank was for, if the book held so little of it. Nyra considered the question for a time. The far bank was for walking to, she answered, and the book was for walking back. One was the span, and one was the thread that made you willing to cross.

They stood a while longer in the middle, where the garden ended and did not yet begin again. The book could not hold the middle of a span, Nyra knew, the narrow place that belonged to neither bank. That was the part you came back for, and the part no page would ever keep.