The Salt Merchant's Daughter of Islamorada

In the town of Islamorada, which is not exactly a town but a long thin bead of islands strung along a highway, there lived a girl whose father sold salt. He sold it in small paper cones, from a stand at the end of the pier, to the fishermen who came in at dusk. The salt was the color of old teeth and tasted, the fishermen said, like the sea in a particular mood.

The girl, whose name was Rosalía, did not want to sell salt. She wanted to read the almanacs that came in the mail every January from a publisher in Havana, and to learn, from them, the names of the winds. There are, according to the almanacs, one hundred and eleven named winds in the Straits of Florida. Rosalía had memorized, by the age of nine, forty-three of them.

One evening a fisherman came to the stand and asked for a cone of salt and, unusually, for the name of the wind that was, at that moment, coming off the water. Rosalía looked at the sky, and at the palm fronds, and at the way the light was moving across her father's arm as he weighed the salt. She said a word. The fisherman had never heard it. He thanked her, took his salt, and left. Later, at sea, he tried the word out loud, into the dark, and the wind — which had, in fact, been that wind all along — answered him.