Chapter 1

The weather station on the ridge was decommissioned in 1998; the county moved to automated sensors and stopped opening the mail. Mara kept taking the readings anyway. Six a.m. and six p.m., wind, barometer, snow depth, on the same form she had used since she was twenty-four.

She mailed them to an office in the capital that no longer had a desk for them. The envelopes came back unopened the first year. After that she started writing her own return address slightly wrong, so they would have somewhere to go that was not straight back to her. It did not help. Nothing to do with weather is ever truly lost. It just stops being read.

She kept it going eleven years past the station and told anyone who asked that she was not sentimental about it. She had made a rule once and the rule had outlived the reason, which is how most things go.

Then one February a letter came. Not returned. Opened. A woman's hand, blue ink. She was archiving the station's old records and had found eleven years of Mara's forms, never filed, and had read every one, and wanted to know, for the record, whether the winter of '03 was really as bad as the forms made it look.

It was, Mara wrote back. She gave the pressure, the snow, the two days the anemometer froze. Then she kept writing, down the rest of the page, the way you finally tell a person the thing you had only been telling to paper: that the quiet up there scared her, and she had kept the post because the post made a sound, and the sound was hers.

The woman wrote back. Mara answered. For four years they wrote twice a month about pressure and snow, and then about other things.