What the Summer Kept

Snow had come in the night, soft and without wind, and by morning it had laid the whole garden away under a smooth white quiet. The girl stood at the door and could not tell where the beds had been. The straw was gone from sight, the low fence was a line of small white caps, and the paths had closed over as though the garden had drawn a blanket to its chin and settled deeper into its sleep.

Nyra came to stand beside her, wrapped against the cold, and for a time the two of them only looked. Nothing moved out there. No green showed anywhere, no colour, no sign at all that anything living waited beneath the snow. To the girl it seemed the emptiest the garden had ever been, a field of nothing where all their summer work had gone to ground and vanished.

But Nyra told her, in her low and even way, that the garden was not empty and they were not going hungry. Everything the beds had grown through the long warm months was still with them, she said, only carried indoors and down into the dark of the cool store. The garden had spent the whole summer gathering light, and now, in the deep of the year, they would live on what it had kept.

She led the girl down beneath the house and showed her the shelves of it. There were the strings of dried apples and the crocks of honey, the sacks of grain and the baskets of roots packed in sand, the bundles of herbs and the little pouches of seed hung safe above the reach of the mice. All of it, Nyra said, was last summers sunlight, folded away and waiting, the good of gone days saved against the want of these.

So the winter was not the going hungry the girl had feared, but a long slow eating of the summer, meal by meal, until the light came round again to make another. The garden slept under its snow and fed them still. Everything it had drawn from the sun it was giving back to them now, a little at a time, and would go on giving until the ground softened and it was time to begin the whole bright round once more.