Larder

The last of the warm days had gone, and Nyra set the girl to carrying jars from the kitchen table down to the cool dark of the larder. There were pears in syrup and beans in brine and a row of small pots of jam the color of old garnets. A book gathers what can be set down in a line and counted, and leaves the rest to the one who was there.

The girl counted as she went, so many jars of this and so many of that, and she called the numbers up the stairs to Nyra, who wrote each one in the book in a slow and even hand. The larder filled by the shelf. The light from the single high window fell on the glass and turned the rows into something like a wall of lamps that would not go out until spring.

When the shelves were full the girl stood in the doorway and looked at all of it, the whole weight of the summer brought indoors and set in order. She asked how the book could hold so much. Nyra said that the book held the number and nothing of the weight, and that the ache in the arms and the cold of the stone and the smell of the fruit were not for the page.

They climbed back up to the kitchen, where the table was bare now and clean, and the long work of the afternoon had left only a line of figures in the book. The girl ran her finger down the column. Each number was a thing she could point to on a shelf below, and yet the doing of it, the long cool hour of it, had gone somewhere the figures could not follow.

Nyra closed the book and set it on the sill. The larder would keep the winter, and the page would keep the sum, and between the two of them nothing of the season would be quite lost. The book keeps the count, and you keep the stowing of it.