The season is not the shop

On the riverbank in Aswan, a man sells carved wooden boxes and painted papyrus to visitors stepping off the boats.

In the hottest months the boats thin out. Whole afternoons pass without a sale. It is easy, sitting there, to believe this is simply how it is now. The visitors have found somewhere else. The good years are over. Perhaps it is time to give up the stall.

Then winter comes, and the bank is crowded from morning to dusk. Stock runs low. He takes on a nephew to help. It is just as easy now to believe the crowds are the new normal, that this is what the business has become, and to order and spend as if it will hold.

Neither belief is right. The quiet months were not a verdict on him, and the busy ones were not a reward he had earned once and for all. Both were weather. Both were going to change, because changing is the only thing conditions reliably do.

This is hard to feel from the inside. A slow stretch narrows the imagination until it cannot picture anything else. A good stretch does the same thing in the opposite direction, which is more dangerous, because it feels like confidence.

The steadier stallholders seem to share one habit. In the slow months they keep the stall clean, the stock fresh and the greeting warm, as though the crowds were coming next week. In the busy months they put something aside, as though they were not.

They are not cleverer about the future. They have simply stopped believing that today is permanent, in either direction.