Nog

The girl wanted to hang a bundle of drying lavender on the stone wall of the shed, but the wall was old fieldstone and would take no nail, for a nail driven at stone only bent, or sprang back, or split the soft mortar in the joint. She asked Nyra how a person fixed anything at all to a wall that was nothing but stone. Nyra said that for that you wanted a nog, a small block of seasoned oak set into the wall itself, and that the setting of a nog was a quiet lesson worth the having.

They raked out a crumbling joint between two stones until there was a clean pocket, and Nyra cut a block of oak a shade larger than the gap, so that it had to be tapped home. The oak went in snug and sat flush with the face of the wall, a patch of honest wood in a field of grey stone. Now there was somewhere for a nail to bite, Nyra said, a place that would hold what the stone alone could never hold. The wall gave the strength and the wood gave the grip, and between the two of them the lavender could hang.

The girl asked why a person did not simply find a wall of wood to begin with, and save the trouble of the pocket and the block. Nyra answered that you worked with the wall you were given, and that most good walls were stone, being what lasts. A nog did not quarrel with the stone or try to make it into something it was not. It only added, at one small place, the one thing the stone lacked, and asked nothing more of it than to stand as it had always stood.

A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there. Some things, Nyra said, would not go straight into the hard fact of a page, the way a nail would not go into stone. For those you set a nog, a softer thing worded in among the plain record, a place made ready to carry what the bare account could never grip. The fact stayed as it was, and the holding was added beside it.

They hung the lavender from a single nail driven into the oak, and it held fast, swaying a little in the draught from the door. The stone was still only stone, and the wall was still the old wall, and yet now it carried a scent it had never carried before. The book keeps the wall, and you keep the fixing of it.