Maya's father collected weather in Mason jars he kept along all the windowsills of their farmhouse, and she believed him, the way children believe in the weight of things they cannot see, a jar of October fog, a jar of the morning after her mother left, a jar he called the last good summer that he would hold to the light sometimes, just to watch it, but she stopped believing at fourteen when a boy at school told her that jars held nothing, that weather moved through and was gone, the way most things were gone, and she told her father this, and he unscrewed a lid and held the jar beneath her nose and she smelled something, cut grass, her own childhood, a tender quality of grief she had no word for yet, then she left for the city and grew into someone efficient and unsentimental, someone who paid bills on time and did not keep things, but years later, when her father died, she drove back to the farmhouse and found the windowsills bare, everything thrown out or given away, all glass gone, and she stood in the empty kitchen and opened her mouth and breathed, in and out, and understood then what he had really been doing all those years, not collecting weather, but teaching her that the ordinary air inside a life, if you paid attention, if you sealed it against the passing of time, was the only thing worth keeping.
Renuka Raghavan is the author of three short-form prose and poetry collections. A Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominee, her most recent collection is Nothing Resplendent Lives Here (Červená Barva Press, 2022).
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