Three Valleys Away
The harness bells rang down the lane, and Elio was out the door before his boots were tied. The post sled stopped at the well each evening and left again at dawn. Elio stood in the lamplight and watched the driver stack the letter sack under the seat. His grandmother lived three valleys away, past the mountain, and would not come back until the river ran again. He had already sent her words. Words went flat on the way. What he wanted to send was her kitchen: cloves and warm butter and the steam off her kettle. You could not fold that into an envelope.
He went back inside and climbed onto the stool by the shelf. His grandmother's spice tin was up there, round and dented and cold. Elio lifted the lid and put his nose all the way in. There was a smell, but a thin one, like a song heard through a wall. He breathed it twice and it got thinner. Outside, the snow came down in slow feathers and muffled the lane. He put on his hat. The storehouse behind the bakery was where the spices lived, in sacks, and nobody minded a boy who shut the door behind him.
The storehouse door swung in without a creak, and the smell arrived before he did. Cinnamon bark. Dried orange peel. Cardamom and juniper and something peppery that made his nose tickle. Elio stood in the dark with his eyes shut and let it come. It was his grandmother's whole kitchen, stored in one cold room. Then he heard a small sound in the corner, a dry rustling, like a leaf turning over. A mouse sat in a split sack of orange peel with her paws tucked under her chin. She was shivering, even there among all that warmth of smell.
Elio sat down on the floor so he would not be so tall. "You can stay," he said. "I only came for the smell." The mouse did not run. She shuffled peel over her feet, and the peel slid off again, because peel is stiff and does not hold heat. Elio knew that. He had once filled his boots with straw and learned the same thing in one cold morning. He looked at the mouse. He looked at his mittens, the old grey ones his grandmother had knitted, soft wool inside. An idea came and sat down next to him.
He turned one mitten inside out and pulled a tuft of lining free. Then another, and another, until he had a small grey cloud in his palm. He set it in the corner of the sack, and the mouse climbed in, turned around three times, and went still. "A little for you, a little for me," Elio said. He gathered peel and bark and three juniper berries, slowly, taking only from the edges, and tied them into his handkerchief. The knot smelled of his grandmother at once, as if she had just that minute set down her knife.
Outside, the lane had gone white again, and the lamps stood in their own rings of light. Elio's left hand was cooler than his right. He did not mind much. He held the handkerchief to his face as he walked and breathed through it, and the walk home took longer than it needed to. At the well, the post sled waited under its blanket with the bells hushed. Elio pushed his small bundle down into the sack, between the letters, where it would be warm. Three valleys away, somebody would untie that knot, and the kitchen would come out of it.
At home he laid his mittens on the rail by the stove and sat with his hands over the heat. His fingers still smelled of orange peel and juniper. That was the part he had kept without meaning to. He thought of the mouse in her grey wool, warm now, in a room full of winter. He thought of his grandmother holding a handkerchief to her face, three valleys off, and he found he was smiling into his sleeve. "A little for you, a little for me," he said, quietly, to nobody. Outside, the snow kept filling the sled tracks in the lane.
Elio went up to bed with the thin mitten tucked under his pillow. The village creaked and settled the way it did every night. Through the window he watched the snow come down in no hurry at all, filling the well cover, softening the roofs until the whole lane looked like a loaf of bread. Somewhere a bell rang once and stopped. "A little for you, a little for me," he whispered, and his eyes closed. Outside, the last of the snow found the ground and lay down.