By midmorning the garden bench had a neat stack of notebooks no bigger than a petal. The ferrets lined up along the slats, each nose waiting for a single page, and the keeper asked them to write no louder than dew.
We asked at the apple kiosk by the gate. The seller said a ferret had nodded to the dew first, then to the apple tree, and only then opened the little book. They take one morning smell, she told us. Then they close the cover and leave the rest of the orchard for later.
A rumor went around that the bench had become a perfume counter. By the next afternoon it was only this: one extra ferret came back to reread the same dew, and every notebook still smelled as light as a good morning.