The Quiet Season
Every winter, the town of Alder Creek went quiet. The loggers headed south, the tourists vanished, and the only sound along Main Street was snow sliding off tin roofs.
Some people called it boring. Odile called it honest. In summer, the town performed: banners on lampposts, a fiddler in the park, shopkeepers smiling at strangers. In winter, you saw what the town was when nobody was watching: a handful of neighbors shoveling each other's walks, a lit window at the library, a pot of soup passed over a fence.
“You can't see a place properly when it's showing off,” Odile liked to say. She had lived there for seventy years and had never once wanted to leave during the quiet season.