Trivet

The girl found the trivet on the low shelf under the window, a small ring of iron standing on three short feet, and she asked what such a plain thing was for. Nyra took it from her and set it in the middle of the table. “It holds the hot pot up off the wood,” Nyra said. “So the heat has somewhere to rest that is not the table itself.”

The girl turned it over in both hands. The iron was dark and a little rough, and it was still warm from sitting near the stove all morning. “It does not look like much,” the girl said, and she set it down again with a small iron sound.

“That is the whole of its work,” Nyra answered. “To stand between a thing too hot to touch and a surface that would scorch. It asks for no thanks and keeps no account. It takes the mark of the heat into itself, and it gives the table underneath it nothing at all.”

The girl wanted to write the trivet into the book, the ring and the three feet and the dark iron of it. Nyra let her, and watched the careful letters go down. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

“You can draw the three feet,” Nyra said, “but not the warmth it carried up from the stove, nor the long evenings it stood guard over a quiet table.” The girl looked at the page, and then at the small dark ring, and she understood. The book keeps the shape of the trivet, and you keep the warmth of it.