Wind by Naomi kritzer(23)

“You already got my daughter a free apprenticeship,” Dagmar muttered, and then said, “Oh, all right, then.”
Zimaya seized her other hand before she could change her mind—left palm to left palm and right palm to right. Dagmar braced for pain, but instead she felt an easing, as if a headache she hadn’t quite been aware of had suddenly gone away, and a loosening. That was all.
Zimaya picked up one of the socks, and a darning egg. “Show me how to fix one of these,” she said. “We can’t leave for months yet, anyway.”

*
Once upon a time, there was a middle-aged woman who packed her bags and left the village where she’d spent her whole life, her grown children who had expected her to care for her grandchildren, and her husband and his falling-down house with the hole in the roof.
The element of change, as everyone knows, is Air. They say that every now and then when the wind blows in a certain direction, it can bring an excess of Air into people who’ve never been known for foolishness. So close your doors on those days; shutter your windows. Don’t go out onto the mountainside and breathe in the wind and look at the sky.