What the Wind Knows

by Amy Harmon

The wind you hear is the same wind that has always blown. The rain that falls is the same rain. Over and over, round and round, like a giant circle. The wind and the waves have been present since time began. The rocks and stars too. But the rocks don’t speak, and the stars are too far away to tell us what they know.”

for it is in the legends and tales that we keep our ancestors, our culture, and our history alive. We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too.

“If you can’t say them, write them. They last longer that way.

“Tragedy makes for great stories, but I’d much rather your story—the one you live, not the ones you write—be filled with joy.

I was not interested in love beyond what I could read on a page.

memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks on us.”

I loved churches the way I loved cemeteries and books. All three were markers of humanity, of time, of life.

But now that I’d seen the graves of my great-grandparents, I wanted to remember their faces. I wondered how long it had been since someone had remembered them, and my heart broke again.