Lintel

The doorway into the drying room had a lintel of old oak, and across it ran a row of small marks, each one cut with a knife on a day worth remembering. Nyra had made the first of them many seasons ago, and the girl had added to the row as she grew. The book held the dates of the marks in a neat column, the year beside each notch, so that anyone might read how the row had lengthened.

On this morning Nyra set a new mark above the others, a little higher than the last. The girl stood against the wood and held very still while the knife went in, and the fresh cut showed pale against the weathered grain. In the ledger the entry was short: a date, a single line, the height written in a careful hand.

What the book could set down was the number and the day. It did not hold the way the girl had risen onto her toes without meaning to, nor the quiet laugh that came when she saw how far the row had climbed. It did not hold the smell of drying herbs that hung in the room, nor the cool of the oak under a waiting hand.

Nyra ran a thumb along the old marks, the deep ones and the faint, reading the years in the wood rather than on the page. Each notch was a morning that would not come again, and the lintel kept them all in a plain unbroken line. The book kept the count; the wood kept the weight of it.

And so the two records stood together, the one in ink and the one in oak. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The girl would carry the rest, and the lintel would hold the marks, long after the figures in the ledger had gone quiet and still.