The Boy Who Caught the Wind

On the side of a green hill, in a house with a blue door, there lived a boy named Wen who loved the wind more than anything in the world.

He loved it when it ran its fingers through the long grass, so the whole hillside shivered like the back of a cat. He loved it when it carried the smell of rain, and when it spun the seeds of the dandelions up and up until they were too small to see. He loved the way it tugged at his shirt, as if it wanted him to come and play.

But the wind never stayed. It came, and it leaned against him, and then it was gone again over the hill, and Wen would be left standing in the still, quiet air, wishing it back.

One evening, watching the grass grow flat and then stand up again, Wen had an idea. If he loved the wind so much, why should he not keep it? Why should he not have it always, the way he had his shoes and his bowl and his bed?

So he went to find a jar.

It was a good jar, round and brown, made of clay, with a lid that fit snug as a held breath. Wen carried it to the very top of the hill, where the wind was strongest, and he waited.

When at last the wind came rushing up the slope, bending the grass before it, Wen lifted the lid and held the jar out wide. He felt the cool rush pour over his hands. Then quickly, quickly, he pushed the lid down tight.

"There," he said. "Now you are mine."

He ran home with the jar held close to his chest. He set it on the windowsill beside his bed, and that night he fell asleep happier than he had ever been, certain that the wind was sleeping too, curled up inside the clay, waiting for him.

But in the morning, the jar was only a jar.

Wen pressed his ear to it and heard nothing. He shook it, gently, and felt no rush, no cool, no tug. He opened the lid and looked inside, and there was only the small round dark, and a smell of old rain.

He carried the jar to his grandmother, who was sitting in the doorway shelling beans into a bowl.

"Grandmother," he said, and his voice was very small. "I caught the wind. I caught it on the hill and I shut it in the jar. But now it's gone. The jar is empty. Where did it go?"

His grandmother set down her bowl. She took the jar in her old hands and turned it over, slow and thoughtful, the way she turned over everything.

"Tell me," she said. "When you love the wind — what is it that you love?"

Wen thought. "The way it moves the grass," he said. "The way it carries the rain-smell. The way it pulls at my shirt and makes the dandelions fly."

His grandmother nodded. "And can the grass move," she asked, "inside a jar? Can the rain-smell travel? Can the dandelions fly?"

Wen was quiet.

"The wind is not a thing you can keep," she said gently. "It is not like your shoes or your bowl. The wind is a thing that happens when you let the world move through you. Shut it up, and it is only still air in the dark. It stops being the wind at all."

She handed the jar back to him.

"Some things," she said, "you love by holding. And some things you love by letting them go."

Wen looked at the jar for a long while. Then he carried it back up the hill, all the way to the top, where the grass grew tall and the sky was very wide.

He waited until he heard it coming — that far, soft rushing, like the sea pretending to be a river. And when the wind came pouring up the slope, Wen lifted the lid and tipped the jar over, and let the small dark out into the great bright moving air.

He could not see it join the wind. But he felt the wind grow stronger around him, leaning into his chest, tugging at his shirt, lifting his hair from his forehead like a hand saying hello.

"There you are," Wen whispered.

After that, Wen did not try to catch the wind again. He kept the jar on his windowsill, but empty now, with the lid off, so that on warm nights the wind could come in and out as it pleased, stirring the curtain, cooling his face, ruffling the pages of the book by his bed.

And it came more often than it ever had before. Perhaps because the window was open. Perhaps because, when you stop trying to hold a thing, you finally have room enough to enjoy it.

Wen would lie in the dark and feel it pass over him, cool and kind and never staying, and he understood at last that this was the whole of it — that the wind was a thing made entirely of leaving, and that was exactly why it was so lovely to have it, again and again, arrive.