Riddle

The riddle hung on a nail by the shed door, a round frame of wood with a mesh of wire stretched across the bottom, and Nyra took it down on the first cold morning of the frost. The girl watched as Nyra set a barrow of dark earth beside the bench and began to sieve, shaking the frame so the fine soil fell through in a soft rain while the stones and roots stayed behind. It was slow work, and the garden was quiet around them, the beds already cut back for winter.

What the riddle kept was the part too large to pass, Nyra told the girl, the pebbles and the broken twigs and the stubborn clots of clay. What it let go was the fine dark crumb that the roots would want come spring. A riddle did not judge what was good and what was poor; it only sorted by size, and the gardener decided the rest.

Nyra said the book was much the same, though the girl had not yet thought of it so. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. The weight of the barrow, the ache in the wrist, the smell of turned earth after frost, none of these would pass onto the page, and none of them were meant to.

The girl asked whether that made the book a poor keeper, and Nyra shook her head. The riddle was not poor for letting the good soil fall, for letting fall was the whole of its purpose. A book that tried to hold every grain of a day would hold nothing at all, only a grey heap with no shape, while what stayed behind in the frame was what you could carry to the next bed and use.

So they worked until the light went thin and the barrow was sorted into two heaps, the coarse and the fine, the kept and the given. Nyra hung the riddle back on its nail and wrote three short lines in the ledger about the beds made ready for the cold. The book keeps the count, and you keep the quiet of it.