The Line at the Bottom of the Page

Every morning at seven, Cordelia reads the thermometer by the back door and writes the number in a book. She has done this for forty years. Once a month she sends a report to the weather office. Nobody has ever asked her a question about it.

At the bottom of every page she adds one more line. It is not part of the report; it is just for her. First snowdrops. First swallow. Wasps in the roof again. Ice on the inside of the window.

In February a letter came from a university, and then a woman came, with a camera.

She did not want the temperatures. Several offices already had them, she said, and they were high or low and that was all. She wanted the bottom lines. Forty years of first swallows in one village is a record that nobody else has.

Cordelia was surprised. She had thought the line at the bottom was the part that did not matter.

The visitor photographed two hundred pages and went away.

The next morning at seven, Cordelia wrote the number. Then she looked at the empty line under it, and for the first time in forty years, she did not know what to write.