What A Lean Is For
At the harvest fair the following year, the other knights came up to Sir Lumi.
"We hear your tower is now famous," said Sir Vol.
"It has geese," said Sir Lumi.
"The King says it's the official goose tower of the kingdom."
"Yes."
"He paid you, we hear?"
"He pays me twelve gold coins a year."
The other knights were quiet for a moment. Sir Lumi's leaning tower was now an asset.
"Could we visit?" asked Sir Vol, who had laughed loudest, last year.
"Yes," said Sir Lumi, who was kind by temperament. "Bring bread. The geese like bread. And don't laugh at the lean. It's the lean that pays the gold."
That spring, several knights brought their children to see the geese on Sir Lumi's tower. The children threw bread. The geese caught the bread mid-air. The lean, which had once seemed like a flaw, now seemed like a feature: every visitor said the same thing — "It looks like the tower is bowing to greet you."
Sir Lumi started saying it that way too.
"My tower," she said, when people asked, "is the only tower in the kingdom polite enough to bow."
She was very fond of the tower now. The geese, when they flew south at the end of the summer, came back the next spring. They knew which tower was theirs.
Sir Lumi never had her tower straightened. Why would she? The lean was the whole point.