The maize stood taller than Nia that year, its leaves rattling like dry paper whenever the wind came down off the hills. She walked between the rows with her grandmother, Amara, a woven basket balanced on her hip, and for a while neither of them spoke. There was a rhythm to harvesting that did not need words: bend, twist, snap, drop; bend, twist, snap, drop. Amara's hands, thick-knuckled and sure, moved twice as fast as Nia's, though she had twice as many years behind her.

'You are thinking of the letter again,' Amara said at last, without looking up.

Nia's fingers paused on an ear of maize. The letter had arrived three weeks ago, its envelope stamped with the seal of a university in the city, four hours away by bus. She had been accepted to study engineering — a fact that had made her mother weep with pride and had made Amara go very quiet, the way she went quiet before rain. 'I was thinking about the harvest,' Nia lied.

'This will be the last one we do together before you go,' Amara said. She said it plainly, the way she said most things, without asking for comfort or offering blame. 'I am not telling you to stay. I am telling you to notice it.' She gestured at the field with her chin: the low sun turning the tassels to copper, the neighbor's children chasing a chicken two fields over, the smell of dust and green sap that Nia had breathed every harvest season of her life. 'A field like this does not ask to be remembered. It only allows it, if you are paying attention.'

Nia said nothing, but she slowed her hands to match her grandmother's rhythm, bend, twist, snap, drop, and for the rest of that afternoon, she paid attention.