I found out what Rose had been writing when she was nine.
Not by looking in the notebook. She showed me.
She came to the library on a Saturday morning, the notebook in her hands, and sat across from me with the expression of someone who has arrived at a decision and is acting on it.
“I want to show you,” she said.
“All right,” I said.
She opened the notebook.
She had been writing, for two years, a record.
Not a diary in the personal emotional sense, though it had that quality in places. A record of what she noticed. The oak’s seasonal changes, charted across pages with observations that were more accurate than nine years old should reasonably produce. The specific quality of the east morning light through her room’s window, described in terms that a professional would not have dismi
