The Salt Cathedral

The morning my mother died the wind from the Velebit came down through the village in the particular way it had only in late November — not gusting, but in long sustained pressure, like a hand laid against the door of every house at once.

I had been awake since four. I sat at the kitchen table in the dark and watched the small blue flame of the gas ring and did not turn it off because the sound of it was a kind of company. The cypresses outside were not moving in the wind so much as leaning into it, very slowly, the way a person leans into another person they have known for a long time.