The night is moonless tonight, and I cannot sleep. I left the cottage and found my way to my row of garlic in the darkness. The stars are there, moon or no, gloriously bright for such a sultry late-summer night. The sulfurous tang of the ripe bulbs clings to my robe even now when I return to my diary and my thoughts. I thought of my mother just now. I haven’t thought of her for years.
When I was ten, this was a place of exile, a place cut off not only by two rivers and a veil of obscurity, but a place cut off from my mother. How many times I snuck out in defiance of Great Aunt Gwinwath and sat on those high cliffs looking down and out on the lands beyond! How many hours I spent wondering where she might be in that distant landscape, and the adventures she would meet there! How the tears flowed down each side of my face, like those twin rivers! She had become the heroine of every story, and the bright star I pinned all my future hopes on. She would return to take me with her!
By age fifteen my mother’s letters were not enough. I jealously guarded every memento she’d left behind – her knitting needles, her old ink well – hoarding them like last autumn’s apples, in hopes they could still nourish my starving love for her. I collected every anecdote of her from Aunt Gwinwath and the others in the community who remembered, and then I emulated her, hoping to revive a dying memory. I pursued her favourite subjects in studies, hungry to taste her passions. I sought out wild mushrooms as she once did, passionate to taste her hunger. I climbed the cliffs and took risks, pushing my boundaries, but as I tried to walk closer with her, her face was fading from my memories.
At twenty, emboldened by the receipt of history, aglow with study of past glories, I took on the mantle my great aunt Gwinwath generously knit for me: to be her apprentice both as a teacher for the very young, and as a custodian of stories for the very old. It was a heavy mantle indeed. And while it warmed me closer than wool, it also gave me a particular sombre appearance: the dark green of remorse bespangled with the silver of hope. I had joined the army of women who wait. Only I did not wait for a husband or a son to return from an uncertain world, I waited for a nation to return from ruin. It was a bittersweet legacy for one so young to carry.
That mantle was not nearly so heavy as it became when I turned thirty. That was when my great aunt’s abundant years finally took their tax on her body, and claimed her sight in payment. I became her walking stick. I wrote down her letters. I recorded her business. I took on her students and I tended her garden. I carried her like a mother, and she began to love me as the daughter of her heart. She came to see through my eyes and I came to understand through her wisdom. Her mission became my own, just as her books were passed into my hands. I would lie if I said I did not stagger a little from this burden.
The years came faster after that, just as the second and third batch of logs thrown on the hearth do not get the same attention as the ones that kindle it. Though they were only a mile distant, I forsook those cliffs and the memories of my mother I had once held so close to my heart. I stopped looking for her letters or news of her fate, though so little word from outside passed through the community even so. I stopped looking for suitors or hope of a family, though few men traveled through the village even so. I stayed to watch the moon sally by the cottage door, content with tales of sailing to far-off lands rather than setting out with a garland of my own. I found company in the dry ink from the pens of souls with whom my great aunt once exchanged breathing words, instead of meeting these ones face to face. I grew roots like an elm tree above the rivers, grasping to hold up the soil at the edge, grasping to maintain the life of the one who needed me, Aunt Gwinwath. How quickly the fire turns wood to ash!
What’s this? Gwinwath stirs, but there is a terrible din from the kitchen! She should not be up at this hour. I must go and see what is the matter.
