Skep

The skep sat at the far edge of the garden, where the grass went long and the light came slanting through the last of the warm afternoons. Nyra walked out to it with the girl beside her, the way she did on the clear days of autumn, when the bees were slow and the work of the year was nearly set down. A skep is a dome of coiled straw, bound round and round with bramble that has had its thorns stripped away, and it has stood in that shape for longer than any book can remember. The bees lived inside it as they pleased, and the two of them came only to look, and to listen, and to learn what could be learned from the outside of a thing that keeps its own counsel.

The girl wanted to know how much a skep could hold, and Nyra told her the honest part first, which is the part that can be weighed. She lifted the straw dome a little way to feel the heft of it, and set it down again gentle as a lid on a pot of something sleeping. The weight told her the season had been kind. A heavy skep in autumn meant a full comb within, and a full comb meant the bees would keep through the cold without being robbed to the edge of hunger.

Back at the table Nyra wrote the weight into the book, the date beside it, and a short note on the colour of the straw and the look of the field flowers still open nearby. The figures lined up under the figures of other years, and a person could run a finger down the column and see how one autumn had fared against another. That was the use of it, and it was a true use, for a number kept well is a kind of memory that does not fade or soften with the telling.

But the book could not hold the hum. It could not hold the warm drowsy air that hung around the skep like a second kind of light, nor the smell of wax and smoke and crushed grass, nor the small fear and the small courage of standing close to so many wings. It could not hold the way the whole dome seemed to breathe, nor the single bee that landed on the back of the hand of the girl and stayed a moment before it rose again into the gold. Those things belonged to the afternoon, and to the two who stood in it, and nowhere else.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. Nyra closed the cover over the new weight and the new date, and let the rest stay where it lived, out in the long grass, inside the coiled straw, in the slow gold of the going year. The book keeps the weight, and you keep the hum of it.