The Jar That Held Summer

On the shelf behind my back stands a glass jar, sealed tight with dark wax. At the bottom lie a handful of black earth, last year's leaves and a few dry blades of grass, so small that guests sometimes ask: - Ivan, what's that, a starter for some potion? And I say: - No. It's medicine. Only not the kind you drink. The kind you hold in your hands when your soul is freezing.

I was told about that jar by a traveling beekeeper. We were sitting out the rain together, sharing a mug of uzvar, and he kept looking at the shelf for a long while, as if searching for an old familiar thing there. Then he took this jar out of his bag and set it down in front of me. - Keep it safe, innkeeper, - he said. - It remembers thunder. It had belonged to a man named Hryhorii.

Hryhorii had a wife, Olena. After a fever she lost her hearing. Not quite the way a door loses its creak, but deeper: the world around her went quiet as snow on a grave. People talked, called out, laughed, and all that reached her was the movement of lips and the trembling of the floor under her feet.

And with that same fever her hands changed too. Her fingers would go cold and bluish, as if the blood had forgotten the way to their tips. Hryhorii warmed mittens for her by the stove, put little bags of hot ash in her palms, rubbed her fingers with oil. It helped, but never for long.

Olena kept silent. She never complained. Only sometimes she would sit by the window and look out at the yard as if waiting for the world to remember how to speak to her. And then, one May day, the first thunder struck. Low, thick, not the kind that cracks up in the sky, but the kind that rolls through the earth, passes through walls, benches, bowls, bones. The windows in the house shivered. The table gave a soft groan. Olena suddenly raised her head and laid her palms on the windowpane.

Hryhorii saw her fingers slowly turning pink. Not from the glass. The glass was cold. But from that deep trembling that came through it. Olena did not hear the thunder with her ears, but her hands heard it. The blood in her fingers seemed to remember the way. For the first time in many weeks, Hryhorii saw her smile. People would say: well, it happened and that's that. Thunder came, thunder went. But love, you know, has a foolish habit of not letting go of anything that has helped even once.

Hryhorii began to think how to keep that trembling for the winter... The beekeeper, who was younger then and carted honey around the villages: Hryhorii came to him for wax. Not for candles, not for foundation combs, not for sealing a barrel. - I need to close a jar so it won't let the summer out, - he said. The beekeeper laughed, then saw his eyes and laughed no further.

Hryhorii took a glass jar and poured onto its bottom black earth from the field where the first thunder had walked strongest underfoot. He added last year's leaves, because leaves remember the earth well. He threw in a few dry blades of grass from the field boundary. And the next time the clouds gathered over the village, he ran not into the house, like all sensible people, but out into the field.

Not to catch lightning. Only fools catch lightning, or those with nobody left to scold them - and that could have been him too, but he was thinking only of his wife. He was catching the sky with the earth.

When the thunder struck so low that his chest went hollow, Hryhorii pressed the neck of the jar to the black wet plowland. The earth beneath it trembled. The leaves inside shuddered. The glass hummed softly, like a hive before swarming. He held the jar there until the thunder rolled away beyond the forest. Then he quickly covered it with his palm, carried it home and sealed it with wax so thick, you'd think he was burying not earth but a heart. The village laughed.

- Hryhorii's planting thunder in a jar! - Next he'll be catching wind in a sack! - And he'll pour rain into his boots, no doubt, and carry it to the fair! And he kept silent. Because there are things that are funny to everyone except the one who loves...

In January came a bitter cold. The kind where the water in the bucket turned to ice in a single night, and the firewood in the stove crackled angrily, as if it were freezing too. Olena's fingers began to go blue again. She sat by the stove, and her hands stayed cold all the same. Hryhorii took the jar down from the shelf.

He did not open it. There was no need. What he had saved did not come out through the neck, like steam from a pot. It lived in the glass, in the earth, in the wax, in that deaf memory of May thunder. He put the jar into Olena's palms. The glass was not hot. No. Not like a stone from the stove. It was warm, and it trembled quietly, as if somewhere very far away a storm was rolling. Olena pressed the jar to her chest, then laid it on her knees and covered it with both hands.

Her fingers began to turn pink. Not quickly. Not like some miracle from a fairground booth. But slowly, the way fire returns to an ember everyone had already given up for ash. That night she slept peacefully. From then on, whenever winter took her hands, Hryhorii would bring out the jar. He said no grand words. He did not call the neighbors over to look. He simply sat down beside her, put that glass piece of May into her palms and held her wrists until her fingers grew warm.

The beekeeper said that after Olena's death Hryhorii could not bring himself to throw that jar away for a long time. And before his own last road he gave it to him. You deal in wax, - he said. - So you'll know it holds more than candles. And the beekeeper, an old man himself by then, brought it to me. - At an inn, it's not usually people's hands that freeze, - he told me. - Let it stand where someone will understand. So there it stands. The wax on top has cracked a little by now.

The black earth at the bottom is dry, the leaves have darkened, the blades of grass have gone thin as hairs. But when the inn is too quiet, and a cold rain keeps falling outside the window, I sometimes take that jar in my hands. And I hear it. Not with my ear. With my palm. Somewhere far away, in May, a warm thunder is rolling, already smelling of summer.

Love is not always borshch, a roof and a warm coat. Sometimes it's when the whole world laughs at you for catching thunder in a jar, and you go on catching it anyway. Because you know: winter will come, and the one you love will need at least a handful of summer in her hands.