Trug

The trug was a shallow boat of a basket, woven from thin strips of willow, light enough that the girl could carry it one-handed even when it was full. Nyra took it down from its peg by the door and handed it over without a word, which meant the two of them were going out to the beds together.

“Not the big hamper?” the girl asked, glancing back at the deep basket standing in the corner. “Not today,” Nyra said. “A trug is for the gathering, not the hauling. You want to see what you have before you heap it up and lose the sight of it.”

They moved down the rows at an easy pace, laying beans and the last of the late peas in a single bright layer along the bottom of the trug. “A hamper hides its own bottom from you,” Nyra said. “A trug shows you everything at once. That is worth more than the saving of a few extra trips.”

In the book that evening they wrote only the weight that had come in from the beds, a single clean figure for the whole day, set down in the column the way they always did, the way the book preferred.

But the book did not keep the shallow willow boat held out level in two steady hands, nor the way the green things lay bright and uncrowded in the low and slanting light, nor what Nyra had meant about seeing a thing fully before you let it vanish into the heap. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. “The book keeps the weight,” Nyra said, “and you keep the seeing of it.”