A Lighter Grief

Morning came grey and slow to the settlement, the light thin through the shutters, and the newcomer woke into it without the old heaviness pressing on her chest. For a while she lay still, listening to the wind worry at the eaves, and understood that something in her had shifted in the night. She had spoken her grief aloud by the fire, had given it words and let the others hear it, and the telling had not broken her. The sorrow was still there, folded close as it had always been. But it no longer sat upon her like a stone she alone had been made to carry.

She rose and went to the hearth, where the embers of the night still glowed beneath a soft grey skin of ash. She knelt and fed them slowly, a handful of dry kindling and then a split length of driftwood, coaxing the small heat back into flame. It was a task she had done every morning since the tide had carried her to this shore, and every morning before that, in a house now lost to her. Her hands knew the work without her mind, and she let them do it, watching the fire take hold. There was a plainness to the morning that felt like a kindness.

When the room had warmed, she turned to the shelves where the summer harvest hung and waited in its earthen jars. She sorted through them without hurry, turning each in the pale light, breathing in the dry green ghost of the season gone. Feverfew and yarrow, lemon balm turned brittle and fragrant, the small dark seeds she had gathered with the girl in the last warm days. Once these had been the whole of her life, the steeping of teas, the making of salves for people she would never see again. Now they were simply what she tended here, and the tending was enough.

Later she drew a shawl about her shoulders and walked out into the garden, and the girl came with her, quiet as the snow that lay unbroken over the beds. The world was hushed and white and very still, the herbs asleep beneath it, the bare vines dark against the pale ground. Nyra was there ahead of them at the garden’s edge, her flax-pale hair loose, her eyes the colour of the clear winter sky, breaking a crust of ice from the water barrel with the heel of her hand. She looked up as they came and said nothing, only drew aside to let them near the water, and the three of them stood together in the cold bright air.

The girl slipped a small cold hand into the newcomer’s, and the newcomer held it, and felt the ache in her chest turn over and settle into something she could bear. Her daughter was gone, and the child her daughter had carried, and the long green years of the garden she had kept, all of it taken by the same sea. But she had spoken of them now, here, to women who had listened, and in the speaking they had become a thing she could hold up to the light rather than a wound she kept hidden. Grief, she was learning, did not have to be a weight borne alone. Held between many hands, even the heaviest sorrow could be carried, and the morning, when she turned back toward the fire, seemed a little wider than it had before.