Not the Same as Being Lost

A child came to the garden gate on the coldest morning of the year, a small girl from the far end of the village, bundled in a coat too big for her and with snow caught in her hair. She stood looking at the bare beds under their blanket of straw, and her face was full of worry. “They are all gone,” she said, when Nyra came out to meet her. “The flowers. I came to see them and they are all gone into the ground and there is nothing left.”

Nyra knelt down in the snow so that her eyes were level with the child’s. “Nothing that we can see,” she agreed. “But come here and let me show you something.” She drew back a corner of the straw at the edge of the nearest bed, and there in the dark soil was a pale knot of root, firm and alive, waiting. “That is the flower you are looking for,” she said. “It has only gone down to sleep, the way you sleep at night, so that it can wake again strong in the spring.”

The child crouched and looked at the root for a long time, and then she looked up. “But how does it know when to wake?” she asked. Nyra smiled. “The same way you know,” she said. “It feels the cold go out of the ground and the light come back into the days, and something in it remembers what it is for. We do not have to teach it. We only have to keep it safe and warm through the dark, and trust it to remember.” The girl who tended the garden with Nyra had come to stand in the doorway, listening, and she was smiling too.

“Will you keep mine safe?” the child asked. “My grandmother has some of the yellow ones in a pouch on her shelf. She says they came from here, a long time ago.” Nyra’s face softened. “Then they are already safe,” she said, “and so are you, because you carry them too, in a way. When the spring comes, bring some of your grandmother’s seeds and we will plant them here beside these, and you can watch them wake for yourself.” The child nodded slowly, the worry going out of her face, and something like wonder coming into it instead.

When the child had gone home again through the snow, the girl came out into the cold and stood beside Nyra at the sleeping beds. “She was so frightened they had died,” she said. Nyra was quiet for a moment, looking out over the white garden and the grey sea beyond it. “Everyone is, the first winter they truly watch,” she said at last. “I was too, once, and so were you. It is a hard thing to learn, that going down into the dark is not the same as being lost. But she will learn it now, the way we did, and one winter she will be the one kneeling in the snow to show it to somebody else.”