A recording for the slow month

The best morning of the year for a woman who sells fig jam in Irbid is often the first weekend of the new figs. The jars are still warm from the week, the table is full, people taste from a small spoon and buy three. By noon the table is half empty, and she can see, very clearly, why she does this.

That is the moment to step away, sit in the car with the phone, and talk into it. Not to post anything. Just to record. What she can see from here. Why the grove matters to her. Who comes back and what they say. What she hopes the stall becomes in five years.

Then save it, and leave it alone.

Because the other mornings are coming. The month when the jars sit unsold, when a cheaper jar is on offer down the road, when a relative asks kindly whether this is really worth it. On those mornings she will not need advice. Advice is easy to find. She will need to hear from the woman who stood behind a nearly empty table in the early light and knew exactly what she was doing.

That woman is hard to reach on a bad day. Memory rewrites the good mornings as luck, or shrinks them. A recording does not. It keeps her reasons and her certainty at the moment they were true.

Most of us only explain our plans when someone asks us to justify them. It may be more useful to explain them while they are working, so that later we can listen to someone who believed in them, and was right to.