The Road Both Ways

A woman came walking down out of the hills on a grey morning, footsore and dusty, with a pack on her back and the look of someone who had travelled a long way. She stopped at the low fence where the girl was turning the cold soil, and she stood a while looking at the beds where the last seed-heads still nodded on their stems. “I have walked three days to find this place,” she said. “They told me inland of a village by the sea where flowers grow at every door. I did not think it could be true.”

The girl set down her spade and came to the fence, and Nyra was not far behind her. “It is true enough,” the girl said, “though it was not always so. They were my sister’s flowers once, and now they are everyone’s.” She told the woman a little of it then, of the seeds kept through a hard grief and given away one plot at a time, until the whole village wore them. The woman listened with her tired face growing soft, and when the girl had finished she said, “That is why I came. Our doorways are bare, and I hoped you might spare a few to carry home.”

Nyra opened the gate and drew her in among the rows, and she pressed a full pouch of dry heads into the woman’s hands. “Take these, and welcome,” she said. “There is no measuring out of a thing like this. It was only ever meant to be passed on.” But the woman shook her head and reached into her own pack, and she brought out a smaller pouch worn shiny with handling. “Then let me leave something too,” she said. “These grow in the high meadows above my village, blue as a clear evening. I have carried them all this way. I would be glad to know they took root here.”

The girl took the little pouch and turned it in her fingers, and she felt the strange weight of it, that a stranger from the hills should have carried a piece of her own home so far to give away. “We will plant them in the spring,” she said, “along the lane where everyone will pass them.” Nyra smiled at the two pouches changing hands across the fence. “So it begins to run both ways,” she said. “For years we have only given. Now the giving comes back to us, and the garden will be richer for it.”

The woman stayed the night in the village and set out again at first light, her pack a little heavier with seed, her road a little lighter for the company. Long after she had gone the girl stood looking at the small blue-flowered pouch in her hand, thinking of a meadow she would never see and a village whose name she had already half forgotten. It seemed to her that the gardens of the world were beginning to speak to one another, doorway calling to distant doorway across the hills and the water, and that her sister’s flowers had opened a road that would carry many things home in both directions for as long as anyone kept walking it.