Arbor

The arbor stood bare now, its slats grey and cool, the summer vines pulled down and turned into the compost weeks ago. Nyra and the girl stood beneath it in the thin autumn light, looking up through the empty lattice at the open sky.

“A frame like this holds nothing of its own,” Nyra said, resting her palm against a weathered post. “All summer the beans climbed it, and it gave them a shape to grow into. Come winter it holds only air, and waits.”

The girl ran a finger along a slat where a tendril had once wound itself tight. “Should I write the arbor into the ledger, then, if it held the whole crop up all season?”

“Write the frame, and the day we raised it, and the weight it bore,” Nyra answered. “But know that the ledger is a frame as well. It gives the season a shape to be read in, and nothing more. It cannot climb, and it cannot green.”

The girl looked from the bare lattice to the blank page and back, and she understood that each was a kind of waiting. One would hold the vines again come summer, the other would hold whatever reader came after, and the rest, the reaching and the holding, belonged only to the living thing itself.