The keeper of the shed was not cruel, only tidy. He had been lending the rain out for years and getting most of it back, and the ledger he kept was the neatest thing Idi had ever seen.
"Your village borrowed in the spring of a good year," he said, "and has not returned since."
Idi looked at the column of her village's name, running down the page year after year, borrowing, borrowing, borrowing.
"What would we return it with?" she asked.
The keeper turned the ledger around so she could see the last column, the one she had not understood.
"Shade," he said. "You return rain with shade. Plant something that will still be standing when you are not."
She went home with an empty jar and a pocket of seeds, and the village was furious with her for a whole season, and then for the next forty years it was not.