The Ones Who Come After

Late in the season, when the beds had mostly gone to seed and the last blooms hung faded on their stems, the children of the village came down to the garden. They came in a loose and chattering band, drawn by the promise of work that felt like play, their arms already reaching for the dry and rattling heads. Nyra met them at the gate and let them in, and the girl went with them among the rows. It was a day for small hands, and there was plenty for them all to do.

The girl showed them how to choose a head that had finished with its flowering, brown and papery and full. She taught them to hold a pouch open beneath it and shake the seeds free, a fine dark rain that gathered in the cloth. Some of the children were careless at first and lost half their seeds to the wind, but she did not scold them, only knelt and showed them again, slower this time. Before long the whole band had the way of it, and the garden filled with the soft sound of shaking heads and the laughter of children at their work.

The girl remembered being their age, small and grieving, when the flowers had belonged only to her and to the sister she had lost to the sea. She had thought then that keeping them was a way of holding on, of refusing to let the last of her sister slip away. She understood now that it had always been the opposite. The flowers were never meant to be held. They were meant to pass from hand to hand, and each pair of hands that took them kept her sister a little more alive.

When their pouches were full, the children scattered to carry them home. Nyra stood at the gate and watched them go, one after another down the lane, each carrying a little of next spring cupped against the cold. She said something to the girl about how the garden would never want for keepers now, and the girl felt the truth of it settle warm inside her. The keeping had passed to hands smaller than hers, and they would pass it on again in their turn.

Long after this season had turned to the next, and that one to the one after, the flowers would still be rising at doorways up and down the coast, in gardens tended by people the girl would never meet. She would grow old in this village by the sea, and one day she too would be gone, but the bright heads would keep lifting to the sun each spring, tended by hands not yet born. Standing among the emptying beds in the fading light, the girl understood that this was the truest kind of keeping there was, not to hold a thing against loss but to give it so freely and so often that loss could never take it back.