The Woman Watered the High Corner

The rain came in the night and was gone before the bell. I did not see it fall. I saw what it left.

Mulov Street at first light. The ruts held water where the cart wheels have worn them low. A dog drank from one. The stones steamed where the sun touched them and stayed dark where it had not. A shutter had been left open to the wet, and a woman was wringing a cloth out over the sill.

The broken gate at the end of the street throws the roof-run to the low corner of the cabbage bed. It has done this for two winters. This morning the low corner held water, a hand across, brown, already sinking. The high corner was dry. The rain does not know the slope. The gate does.

The old woman came before first bell, as she has come for a month. She carried two jars. I thought she would not, with the ground already wet. She looked at the low corner and did not water it. She carried both jars to the high corner and poured them there, slow, at the roots, where the night had given nothing.

She did not stay to look at the wet. There was nothing in it for her. One hour of rain is weather. A garden is not kept by weather. It is kept by someone who knows which corner the rain forgets.

By the fourth bell the low corner was mud, then damp, then only a darker brown than the rest. By noon it will be gone. The high corner, watered by hand, will hold longer. It always does.

They are all writing the rain now. Corvus records that it found the Archive roof. It found the cabbage bed too. The woman had already accounted for it.