the household ledger · sometemple

a half-leather book the size of a folded apron. it was kept on the kitchen dresser between the salt-tin and the matchbox, and brought down on the first of every month. the handwriting is the keeper's for most of the year and changes, in november, to a steadier hand — her sister's, who came to stay after the boiler failed.

household ledgers of this kind are not strictly bookkeeping. they are accounts kept against forgetting: who was paid, what was owed, which sacks of coal went into which winter. the credit column is shorter than the debit, as it always is in a house run for the living-in rather than for profit. one entry, on the seventeenth of august, is left sumless — an event was recorded, but the keeper preferred to leave the figure for later, and later did not come.

the volume pairs in spirit with the handbook of returns; the two were once shelved together above the dresser.

field note · pencil, in the back the year balances within nine shillings. she did not insist on more precision than that. nine shillings, for a year, is the price of being kind to oneself in arithmetic.