Spar

On the last dry afternoon before the rains, Nyra climbed the short ladder to the top of the corn rick and set about pinning down the new thatch. A spar is a length of green hazel, split and sharpened and twisted at the middle until it folds into a long staple, and driven across the straw it holds the whole roof against the wind. She had cut a basket of them that morning and carried them up one by one.

The green wood bent without breaking because it was cut fresh and full of sap. A dry spar would snap and a brittle one would split, but a spar taken that same morning could be wrung almost double and still spring back to grip the straw. The knowing of which rod would bend and which would break lived in her hands and not in any line of the book.

She worked along the ridge, driving each spar deep and crossing it with the next, while the apprentice passed the rods up to her and kept a tally of how many went in. A count is a steady and useful thing. It could tell them in a later year how much hazel a rick of that size would take, and how long the topping had held against the weather.

But the tally could not keep the give of the green hazel as it bent to her will, nor the smell of cut straw warming in the low sun, nor the small fear of the ladder and the gladness of the last spar driven home before the sky turned. Those belonged to the afternoon and to the two who were there.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. It can keep the number of spars a rick took and the day the thatch was pinned, but not the bend of green wood or the wind that pulled at the straw. The book keeps the count, and you keep the girding of it.