Zenny's Day

I am awake before the sun most days, and I sit.

That is the whole of it. I sit like a statue and take five slow breaths and let the land wake up around me, and I try to let everything go past. A leaf. The gate. A beetle walking over a stone as though it owns the stone. Each little sound comes and puts a paw on me, and the work — my whole work, every morning, for years — is not to go after it.

So when the clatter came from over by Winky's gate, I let that go past too.

And then I sat with it.

Because that had not been the world being busy. A gate creaks on its own. A leaf falls on its own. Nothing tips over by itself and then goes on rolling for that long.

I opened both eyes, which I almost never do before the birds.

Mossy was down at the bottom of the garden already, saying good morning to a snail.

"Mossy. Did you hear it too?"

"Hear what?"

"Something went over at Winky's. Something with a lot of small parts in it. That way. Before the birds started."

I did not go and look. That is not my sort of job. Mossy went, and told me afterwards that there had been a lantern lying in the long grass with a snail asleep inside it, and a flattened trail through the grass much too long to have been made by one.

By seven the whole land was up and shouting and there was not a single lantern hanging anywhere. I kept my sound in my paw like a pebble, in case anybody came asking. Somebody did, eventually.

Later I watched Squirmy try to sit through Tidy's plan and get about as far as then that. Ten big jumps at the end of the lane, back again, another minute, off again. It was not naughtiness. It was a body with somewhere to be.

"Squirmy. What's the job at the far end?"

"Carrying. All the way past the orchard and back. Loads of it. Miles."

"Mm," I said, and went back to being still, and Squirmy went and took that job off a fluff who had been dreading it and ran it twice over before lunch, singing.

I did not tell Squirmy where to go. I asked where the running was. There is a difference, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn it.

At four o'clock the whole land came apart at once — snapping over the ladder, something unfair said about the orchard, a lantern put down harder than a lantern wants to be put down.

Tipsy got off the wall and walked into the middle of the yard and did not say one word. Just stood there, being extremely still, in the way Tipsy is still, which is so unlike everything else happening that you cannot ignore it for long. One by one they stopped.

I have never been so pleased about anything in my life.

"That was the loudest thing anybody did all day," I said afterwards.

"Nobody could hear me," said Tipsy.

"I know. So you stopped talking. Very good idea."

Fifty-five fluffs in one room is not my weather.

I found the far end of the window seat and sat there and did not speak to anybody for about an hour, and was perfectly content. Mossy came and sat for a while with grass still on both feet and said nothing either, which is the best kind of company. The noise went over the top of us the way water goes over a stone.

Then Beamy got up on the bucket with that envelope and read out what everybody had done, all of it, for eleven minutes — and somewhere in the middle I heard my own name, for hearing a box go over in the dark.

I had not expected to be on a list. I did not do anything. I sat down and listened, which is what I do every morning of my life whether there is a box or not.

Apparently that counts.

Then we all walked up the lane to the Wheel, and stood in the cold and watched it turn for the first time since the spring, and nobody said anything at all for about a minute, which was the best minute of the day.