Chaff

The morning was dry and a steady wind came down from the hill, and Nyra carried the last basket of threshed barley to the flat stone where the winnowing was done. The girl followed with the wide shallow tray, holding it against her chest the way one holds a thing that matters. Together they had cut and dried and beaten the barley through the long middle of the season, and now only this remained, the parting of the grain from all that was not grain.

Nyra lifted a measure into the tray and tossed it upward into the moving air. The heavy seed fell back as a soft rain, and the chaff, light and spent, drifted sideways and was gone over the wall. The girl watched the pale cloud of it scatter across the rows and asked whether the chaff was simply waste, a thing of no use that the wind was welcome to carry off wherever it pleased.

Not waste, Nyra answered, only finished. The chaff was the husk that had guarded each seed through the green weeks and the ripening, the coat that held the kernel safe until the kernel no longer needed holding. It had done the whole of its work. To call it waste would be to forget the months when it was the only wall between a tender grain and the hard weather of the world.

The girl turned a handful of clean barley in her palm and said that the book of the garden, the ledger they kept through every season, seemed to her a kind of winnowing also. Nyra agreed. A page could hold the weight of a harvest, the measures and the dates and the running count of what the beds had given, the grain of a year pressed down into ink. But the chaff of it, the smell of dust and dry stalks, the ache across the shoulders, the particular slant of this one wind, all of that the page let go, as it had to.

They worked until the tray held only the heavy brightness of the seed and the stone around them was bare. A book keeps the grain, Nyra told her, and trusts the body to remember the chaff, and perhaps that was no loss at all but the quiet mercy of it, that a page is asked to carry only what will still feed someone in the cold, and is spared the keeping of everything else.