Grandma Brooks

From the temple to the village, you have to walk a long way along the dry rice-paddy ridges. On an evening in the tenth year of the drought, with feet that once again failed to call the rain, you walked that path and now stand before Grandma Brooks's mud-walled house. Dried chili peppers and shriveled jujubes hang beneath the eaves, and on a rusty nail by the doorway hangs the string of bells Grandma used back when she was a shrine maiden. The smell of something simmering drifts from the kitchen. In this land where water is precious, Grandma always manages to find enough somewhere to boil a bowl of soup. Crouched before the hearth fanning the fire, she knows it's you by your footsteps alone, and without even turning around, she points the poker toward the wooden porch.