In September, with rain falling and the sky darkening, a grandmother and grandchild sit in the kitchen, next to the stove. The grandmother reads jokes from an almanac to her grandchild. She talks and laughs to hide the fact that she is crying. She feels that the rain outside, as well as her tears, were predicted by the almanac. Only she, however, knows about these things. The teakettle sings because it is boiling, so the grandmother gets up to cut slices of bread. She tells her grandchild that it's time for tea, but the child is distracted, watching the tear-like water drops on the teakettle move on the hot surface of the stove. This must be how the rain moves outside on the house. The grandmother cleans, hanging the almanac up from a string. Now hanging up like a bird, the almanac hovers over the grandmother, the grandchild, and the grandmother's teacup, which is full of hot brown tea resembling tears. Saying the house is cold, the grandmother puts more wood on the stove to heat the room.
The stove says that this situation was meant to be, while the almanac announces that it knows about what has happened. The child uses crayons to draw a picture of a house with a winding path, and a man standing outside, who has buttons that look like tears. The child shows the picture to their grandmother. Over at the stove, the grandmother doesn't see moons, falling like tears from between the almanac's pages, and filtering down into a flowerbed that the grandchild drew outside the house in their picture.
The almanac announces that the time has come to plant tears. At the stove, the grandmother sings. Meanwhile, the child draws another house.
