Ailsa
The leaves were young on the oak trees. I could see the fresh color bursting from the treetops in the oak grove down the river. From where I stood on our cultivation allotment, the tallest, and thus oldest, oaks had recently become visible over the top of the ash grove that had been pollarded during the past winter solstice, one year after my wedding, leaving the view clear and inspiring. I tilted my head in sympathy for the ash grove, however, for having its beauty stripped from it, cut down to little more than stumps. I’d seen this happen to the forest trees for my whole life, but I had come to know intimately what that dramatic pruning felt like for myself over this winter. Still, pollarding was a necessary refining process. It gave us wood for our boats, fires, and structures and kept the trees alive so they could grow up around us and provide for us again years down the road. We kept things alive as much as we could, and sometimes that meant severe pruning.
A year had come and gone since our wedding, and the sage women of the village had come to me bearing raspberry leaves and the foremilk of recently calved cows. As our one-year anniversary had passed us by with no conception, my lack of pregnancy had become a concern to others but a blessing for me. My grandmother looked at me with soft, knowing eyes as the other women explained how frequently to make the tea at the waxing of the moon and when to share the foremilk with Aric. They were very delicate about the fact I had not produced an offspring, and I suppose I appreciated that under the circumstances, but I felt like I was running out of time in postponing the inevitable. Druid rites weren’t strictly passed through bloodlines since Druids often didn’t marry, but as one of the oldest families in my village, our Druid line was direct, and I was the end of it. It was simple. It was my duty, my destiny. All of Ros’s recent pleas for us to run away had elucidated that fact for me as I needed to understand the full picture of that which I was running away from.
Up until the last few weeks, I had been vigilantly collecting stinging nettle and tansy root for tea, in addition to taking wild carrot seeds to protect myself from pregnancy. So far it had worked, but without a pregnancy, people would only grow more suspicious of our marriage, and the last thing I needed was more eyes on me these days. I had lost count of the number of nights I had met Ros at the coast or the cliffs over the course of the last few moons, but I hadn’t seen him at all since he had confronted me at the middens after Aric’s latest return from his travels, not even in passing at the smokehouse or root cellar, and so I stopped taking the preventative seeds and teas. During this time I didn’t even seek the company of my grandmother outside of the daily cooking and cleaning I helped her with. Even then, I busied myself so much with the quern, mending, laundry, and grinding that there wasn’t time for idle chat.
Resettlement was happening on the mainland, and that meant Aric took frequent trips with the other village warriors, staking our stronghold and scouting for potential threats or trade partners. From what I gathered from him when he returned, just before Beltane, there were far more of the latter than the former. Aric was excited about the opportunities for trade and had brought back several special totems for me, shiny things of beauty for my hair and wrists that I had never seen the likes of. He seemed distracted by these adventures and not overly worried about our lack of conception, which was such a relief. He himself carried a new whale bone mace head, larger than both my hand put together, and carved to perfection. I tried not to imagine it bursting Ros’s skull open.
Over our last meal together, he had, however, told me a story that Ray had once told him about the last female Druid, who, forty years prior, when Ray was a boy, had been unable to conceive despite her favorable marriage to an explorer from a faraway village. Ray said it had to do with differing blood types. He smiled at me and brushed the hair back out of my face when he told me, as if to assure me it was all fine. I couldn’t summon the courage to tell him that I had secretly hoped that would be our story too, but it appeared that was not going to be so.
The season changed around me and inside of me. That vibrant, new spring green that was visible as I worked our allotments to raise the barley and kale grew into the verdant landscape that sends children, rabbits, foals, and yearlings tripping through the rolling green hills and rushing creeks fresh with runoff from the melted snow of the mountaintops. Young doves peeked out at me from ramshackle nests as I gathered herbs and tended the vulnerable barley plants that would yield our harvest in half a year. Six moons. Thinking of that passage of time, the cycle of the year, brought my mind to a more personal reflection of my own change.
As I foraged one morning, excited with the recent rain and new mushrooms available, a jay landed on my shoulder. I gently placed an acorn in his beak. “Go plant this for me,” I whispered to him. “And grow me an oak that will live for a thousand years.” He did. The woodland always listens.
Spring was such a miraculous season in our landscape. I knew that what was happening within me was the perfect reflection of the rebirth and rejuvenation of spring that surrounded me. My long, twig-like fingers pulled aside my green cloak and touched my still-flat belly with a sign of tranquility. It was a visceral acknowledgment of the life that I knew stirred within me, like the Druid’s blessing over the hearts of our people.
And so I gave this new, bright-green life within me my own sort of blessing and felt her strong heartbeat respond to my touch and pulse from inside of me. I silenced my own heart’s desires and heard her speak from within me.
It was Beltane when I knew without a doubt. We had sailed to the Beltany stones for our ceremony, where the setting sun fell between the two great menhirs, and other villages joined us to relight the fires of our home hearths. When I touched the largest stone at the fire festival that night, I felt her flutter inside my womb. I did what all newly expectant mothers do when I felt it: leaving one hand on the menhir, I caressed my womb with the other, as if to say, “Hello there to you too.”
Then I became self-conscious. Had anyone seen me? My eyes darted around as the ceremony continued, wondering who shared my secret now. Everyone was staring at the fire, Ray, or the dancers as they approached for the Beltane dance, which was probably the most beautiful and ethereal dance of them all. I sighed with relief that no one was watching me, despite the feeling I had, and then I saw Ros, who was standing some way off from the stones with his sister and the twins they were betrothed to, out of the corner of my eye. He had been positioned perfectly for watching me. I smiled as our eyes met for an instant, for the first time in a while, and then the drums carried me away to my duty.
I sucked on a wild raspberry while sitting cross-legged in the late-spring grass, looking south over the rolling green hills of our home some days later. We were on the tallest munro, one of seven little mountain peaks that dissolved into the hills we looked on below. We had walked for hours, talking sometimes, sometimes walking in silence, hand in hand. Aric had found a nice boulder to lean up against at dusk, so we sat a while, and I promised him I could lead us off the mountain by the light of stars alone. The day had grown warm, and we sat on my large green Druid cloak, he in his wool kilt and linen shirt, me in nothing but my linen dress, which had begun to cling to my widening hips. I liked that Aric wore the corded skirt or wool kilt of the northern men, like my father. Men of our village often wore breeches or longer vestments like the Druids, and I appreciated seeing his muscular legs stretched out before me. He bent over me, taking another sweet, ripe, red fruit from my hand with his mouth, gently. He had exuded a new peace all spring, and it drew me to him like the forest animals leaving the shelter of their trees for our village fires and feasts, hungry for a dropped morsel or a moment’s warmth.
When Aric thought deeply about something, he couldn’t help but move anxiously about. I had considered putting a broom in his hand more than once when he paced around the house on the eve of some great exploration. The thought made me smile as I pressed the cool horn opening of my leather flagon to my lips and enjoyed another sip of grandmother’s strong birch sap wine. I felt lightheaded and giddy with happiness. There was simplicity in this moment, but I was about to ruin it, unknowingly.
“How did you end up here, in a place so far from your real home?” I asked into the fading daylight. “I’ve heard stories about what happened to your father’s ship, but I’ve never heard it from you. Weren’t you settling or exploring the westerly isles?”
I turned around so I was looking at him, but something about his glare made me return my eyes back to the hills and horizon. There wasn’t anger behind his eyes but an intensity like I had never seen before. “I’m just piecing together things Ray has told me over the years. I’m sorry if it’s upsetting.” And then there was another long pause as I reached for his hand and stroked the worn and cracked knuckles.
“This is my home,” Aric responded, smiling just a little and using one finger to turn my chin back toward his face. “Ray saved my life, not just that day on the shore but many times after that. When Iona died. When he suggested my marriage to you. He said I came back to life that day he found me, and since I was born again that day, it is sometimes painful to think of my old life. It feels—” He paused, raised his eyebrows, and made a guttural noise that could have passed for a laugh with someone else, but I thought it sounded a bit more like disgust. “It feels so distant from my life now, and yet it is so close to my heart. Is that possible?”
“Of course it is,” I answered, feeding him another raspberry. “So you died and came back too? Just like a Druid priest.” I wondered what that meant. Maybe Aric had too.
“It was terrifying.” It was barely a whisper, but the words came as such a shock that I heard them ringing loud and clear, echoing over the hills in front of us. It was nearly summer, and the night was just like a midsummer evening: a bright sunset in purple, blue, orange, and red, a carpet of grass and flowers perfect for lounging, midges everywhere despite the light breeze. I swatted at a few flying around my face and realized how stunned I actually was at this admission of his. I tried to picture Aric terrified, even the younger, widowed Aric I could remember from my childhood. He never seemed afraid of anything. He came home telling stories of small battles or skirmishes on the road, cattle raids, blood sacrifices, and much stranger and more frightening things from abroad. He seemed amazed and intrigued but never scared. I was so stunned by his display of emotion that I realized I hadn’t replied or comforted him in any way in the minutes that had passed as the sun sank faster and faster below the horizon. After too long of a silence, all I could think to blurt out was “Tell me, Aric.”
My posture changed to a more alert squatting position, and I hugged my knees, peering into his face, which was still looking ahead at the colorful horizon, beautiful legs stretched out before him down the hill. “It was like the earth opened, Ailsa. It wasn’t a storm like people have said.”
“What do you mean?” I asked gently.
“It was a beautiful evening. Almost exactly like tonight,” he said, looking at me for the first time in a while. “It was like the earth opened in the water, and there was a great pull to the center that overcame the ship’s direction. I could actually hear the strength of the water crunching the ship, as if chewing it up to devour it. I still hear the sound of the timber cracking now. I have never seen men as genuinely terrified as the men on board were, and these were people, Ailsa, who had been in battle, watched their friends, children, and women die. These men had seen rough lands and unimaginably bad men and lived to tell the tale. Until that night.”
“A maelstrom,” I whispered. I couldn’t help but let my mind wander to what Ray had said about the changes that the earth was experiencing at our meeting on the equinox. He had described it in just this way; the strong pull that I felt to the center of the earth was similar to what those who had built the stone circles had felt generations before. They had been called by the earth to erect the structures over a thousand years ago, and there was a similar summoning of our generation—but to what, exactly, he was not sure. Instinctively, I felt that it also had to do with the stones. This was a very long story that the earth was telling.
“I suppose that’s what it was,” Aric said. “Ray said he had heard tales of such things happening south of here, and he believed the shifts happening in the earth were responsible, perhaps that they triggered one another, even.”
I rested my hand delicately on Aric’s chest. “But how could you possibly have survived such a thing? As such a young boy among older men, among warriors who had seen battle yet didn’t survive themselves.”
Aric struggled to answer, his throat too full of emotion to swallow. “It was mostly because of them, actually. They saved me and did everything to get me off the ship as soon as they realized it was going down. My father’s men used the cannon launcher to throw me and the raft as far toward the land as possible.” He laughed at the clear ridiculousness of sharing that memory out loud, but the laughter caught in his chest, thickened by grief. “I remember the feeling of sailing into the darkness, hopeless. I remember thinking, This is what death must be like.”
“So then you just washed up on the western shore of the island?” I already had a vivid image in my mind of Ray climbing down to the caves below and finding, to his surprise, a boy washed up on the beach like a jellyfish.
“I’m not sure how long I drifted or waited before Ray found me out on the rocks, clinging for dear life,” Aric confessed, “but I know what day it was when I arrived. And actually…” he continued, ignoring my dumbfounded look. He laughed heartily this time, and just the sound of his resilient happiness calmed me in a way I wasn’t expecting. It was like hearing my father’s laugh, and I realized in that moment how much I carried with me the fear of the men I loved sinking too far into their sadness to be saved.
“Ray was there, looking down on me when I finally opened my eyes, which had swollen shut from all the salt water. At first sight of him, I wasn’t sure if he was God and I had reached some sort of rocky afterlife or if he was the sorcerer who had sent the whirlpool.” I laughed at the thought of Ray as some sort of miniature god at this stature, surely disappointing to a twelve-year-old boy. “I just remember him wrapping me in his cloak and plying me with fish and ale in the cave until I finally had the strength to walk up the cliffside.”
“I just don’t understand,” I practically yelled. “Why isn’t this story a ballad we sing at every fire, festival, and wedding? It’s incredible.” I shook my head in disbelief. “Everyone in the world should celebrate this story of your survival, at least our little village should.”
Aric smiled. “Sometimes I don’t believe it myself. The likelihood of surviving something like that.”
“Aric—” I began but didn’t know how to finish. My eyes filled with tears, and I waved my hand in front of my face again, pretending like I was swatting midges instead of trying to prevent the tears from falling. “I don’t know what to say, or how to make sense of anything you just told me, except death won’t be like being catapulted into nothing. I do know that fore sure.”
“I trust you,” he responded, enveloping me within his huge arms, pulling me down to the grass to look up at the purple sky with him. “I trust whatever you tell me.” he added.
I sighed. “Did you say you remember exactly what day it was?” I asked into his neck stubble, curling up like a shrimp by his side and pulling my long Druid’s cloak to cover both of us.
“It was the summer solstice nineteen years ago, Ailsa. The day you were born. Ray told only the other Druids about what happened to me, and it was overshadowed by the great loss of your mother a few days later—I’ve heard the tales of her rare talent and beauty. Ray said it was also the birth of the next head Druid, like the maelstrom was a harbinger of your existence.” The words hung in the air, suspended by the twinkling stars that began to come out, one by one, as the sky darkened. “Ray said I was as good as dead when he found me, but somehow he was able to push the water from my chest, and I came back to life.”
I felt a tear run down my cheek. I wiped the tear away and looked up at my husband, this mystical Norse creature the gods had delivered to me just before they took my mother from me. The closeness I had felt to him over the last few months was not just me running toward a duty and away from Ros. It was a real closeness, another example of the ordained life I led.
“I thought when I was a child that it was just because you were born on midsomer that you were thought to be so special by the Druids, but now I know you are magical in your own right, and the Druids saw it immediately, even through their grief for your mother.” He broke his seriousness and smiled mischievously. “You are the most enchanting thing I have ever encountered.” He tenderly kissed the nape of my neck and my shoulders, so gently it almost felt like the midges again, and I nearly swatted him away.
“Aric?” I stopped him from his warm, wet kisses, his mouth totally enveloping mine in passion, by placing my first two fingers over his lips and staring, vulnerably, into his eyes. “How many women were you with before me?”
Aric paused and lifted himself up a little. The stars had really come out now behind his back, and he was framed by them, so perfect in his form that he was like a constellation himself. I thought back to the first time I had lain with Aric and how I did not love him then but had rather performed out of duty. It was hard to think about that now. I felt so differently, just a little over a year later. Sometimes it seemed so much longer ago. I was lost in the deep indigo color of his eyes, with those gold flecks at the center. Looking into them was like looking up at the night sky, and the two sights started to blend together.
“Don’t ask me that,” Aric finally responded, looking down at me. “Ask me how many I truly loved before you.” I turned away, unable to meet his intense gaze. “Ask me.” He brushed my cheek with the back of his fingers. When I looked at him, there was no way to deny his request. He stared at me, willing the question. “I’ve never loved in this way before, Ailsa.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, pushing his mass off of me onto the ground.
“It’s true.” His voice cracked. “I don’t care if you believe me. Or even if you judge me.”
I stared back at him, turning away from the edge of the northern peaks looking over the hills below. The wind picked up, blowing my green cloak away, and I stood up to chase it. I ran a bit downhill, grabbed it from the breeze, picked the loose strands of hair out of my mouth and wrapped my cloak around my shoulders.
“It’s, it’s—different.” He stuttered, struggling for the words to explain. We stood a distance apart now. “It’s the difference between being a boy and being a man. It’s remembering my parents and knowing what their love was like. Truly, it’s having the fortune of loving Iona and loving you—and knowing the difference.” I narrowed my eyes at him, not understanding the declaration since it had been widely known that he had mourned the loss of his precious, young wife for many years, and it had been assumed that there was great love between them.
As if reading my mind, he looked into my face and walked toward me in a few huge strides. “Ailsa, I loved Iona in every way I could then, but I pray to the gods that I could have shown her the love that I am able to give to you. The type of love my father felt for my mother. Maybe my love for Iona would have grown into this, but it didn’t get the chance. I wasn’t even wed to her as long as we’ve been wed.” That realization broke my heart for him and for young, sweet Iona.
Something between Aric and me had changed recently, I knew. And now I was starting to understand what the catalyst of the shift was. I was learning from him. He had experiences in life and love that I did not, and as I opened myself up to knowing him in a deeper way, I had also started to grow myself. I valued his perspective and experience. I no longer looked down from my position as Druid on his position as an explorer. I hadn’t said anything to him about this realization, and he searched my face for some clue to what I was feeling.
“I’m afraid of how overwhelming it feels at times—the fear of losing you,” he said quietly, vulnerably.
I ran toward him, and embraced him, my green cloak flying up around us. “I didn’t think you felt fear.” I smiled up at him as I spoke, and I wanted his broad mouth to grin down at me, but he maintained a fierce look, staring into my soul.
“Maybe Druids are braver than warriors,” he said, a grin rising over his lips. “I’ve escaped near-death a few times, Ailsa, but I know what I truly fear, and I don’t mind admitting it.”
I hugged him tightly, wanting him to feel held. “Fear doesn’t prevent death or loss; it only prevents living,” I said, pushing his long hair behind his ears.
“I see Ray’s gotten to you with that one too,” he said, laughing. He kissed me then, for a long time, until I grabbed his hand and asked him to walk down the mountain and go to bed with me.
The walk down was leisurely. We held hands and said little as we navigated moss-covered rocks, sleeping goats, and steep footholds. Luckily, there were no trees or tree roots to hinder our descent, and the dampness had been burned off the grass by the warm day.
As I led Aric down toward the hillside trail that took us back to the village, I thought about the maelstrom on the summer solstice nineteen years ago and what that meant. One of the stones had cracked the day I was born, and this was taken as one of the many signs that I would be the next head Druid. The stones erected for the circles had been chosen by our ancestors for a reason, and that reason lay in the hue that the stones took on in sunlight. From farther away, they were a blue color, while on closer inspection, it was apparent the stones were in fact gray; they just had tiny purple veins, like a human’s blood, that shone in the sunlight and contributed to the blue look of them.
I decided I would inspect the crack in the stone and ask Ray about the purple veins before the summer solstice that marked nineteen years since the crack, since Aric’s arrival. If the gods had sent Aric to me that day, we were surely destined to play an important role in what was to come. By the time we were on the path back to the village, our pace had doubled. An urgency was driving us both, and I could feel it pulsating between our palms.
I wondered for a moment if he had mentioned his fear because he suspected my current condition. I had just missed my latest moon cycle the week before, and it was possible he could have noticed since I normally had extra laundry to do and often ate his portion of our day’s meat to replace the blood I lost during my cycle. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, questioning, and he looked back at me as lustful as a stag in Autumn as we turned toward our roundhouse. Whatever he might have suspected, it clearly was not what was on his mind at that moment.
Yes, the issue of the stones’ veins was something that needed to be observed both up close and far away in every sense. I would speak to Ray about it directly, but it would have to wait until tomorrow.
“Grandmother?” I peeked into her roundhouse the next day with the sweetest voice I could muster. She was stiff in the mornings at her age and swept hunched over her broomstick. I stepped over the dust pile in front of the doorway and walked toward the hearth to warm myself. It was a cool morning for midsummer, and the lightest of frosts had formed on the small vegetable patch outside my bedroom window.
“Ailsa, it has been days since I saw you last. What has kept you away, child?”
“I’ve just been busy preparing for the upcoming solstice ceremony.”
“Ahhh, I see,” she said without looking up from her broom, though I saw the crinkles form in her eyes as she smiled down at the floor. I wondered for the first time if her eyesight was going.
“Speaking of midsummer, I have question about my birthday,” I said, squatting by the fire.
“Ahh, I see,” she said again, this time looking up at me, using her broom as a walking stick to come closer to where I sat by the hearth.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that was the day that Aric arrived? Washed up on shore from his ship?” I asked. And she dropped the broom.
I motioned for her to sit with me. She slowly added some herbs from her pocket to the water on the fire to prepare a tea for us, then carefully lowered herself down to sit next to me. “Aric told you this?” she asked, stirring the pot. I nodded. “I didn’t realize Aric knew that was the day he arrived. How incredible, what the human spirit retains! He slept for days after his arrival and then was in and out of consciousness for weeks, sometimes forgetting where he was when he awoke.” She handed me a round mug from the table next to the fire. I tapped my fingers on the earthenware mug as it seemed she was still avoiding my question.
Grandmother said nothing but knelt by the hearth, collecting warm water from the cauldron for her tea bowl, into which she dropped several more herbs, one of which smelled strongly of peppermint. She sat down cross-legged by the fire, blowing on the water to cool it, and invited me to snuggle up close to her with a simple gesture of patting on the hides. So I did, breathing in her herbaceous smell while I prepared my own tea.
After a period of sipping teas and pleasantries, I said in a new voice that didn’t quite sound like my own what I couldn’t explain in my own head, even after days of thinking about it. “At the solstice ceremony where I became a Druid, Ray told the village that my tie to the earth was deeper because of openings and shifts below and what was occurring in the earth when I was born. And Ray told me recently that I am a dowser like Father was, that I can sense what is happening energetically and even where gemstones, water, or other resources might be.”
“You are very good at finding herbs,” Grandmother joked as she motioned to all the ground herb leaves by the hearth and the dozens still intact hanging above us.
I smiled and sipped my tea, continuing, “When Aric told me about how the ship he was on sank on the day I was born, it sounded like that shift was happening and may have caused the great maelstrom. I’m not saying my birth caused this shift, but maybe the shift caused me to be born that day, bringing on mother’s labor pains?”
“Yes, just as you were meant to be,” I heard my grandmother whisper into her tea.
“Grandmother—” I began, seriously, but she cut me off.
“Ailsa, we have maps of the land and sea to show us the way to new places and new routes to sail on. Those maps change and develop with time as we travel more and learn more about the surrounding seas and terrain.” I nodded and sipped my tea. “There are places we still haven’t been, so the maps are incomplete—and that’s why we also have maps within our hearts that lead us to our destinies. These maps of our hearts also change as we explore, go on adventures, and learn more about ourselves, but there are some roads that remain unchanged, that were there long before we even started navigating.”
“Why do I feel like there’s something you’re not telling me?” I asked quietly.
She looked at me with defiance in her face. “I don’t know why Jord and Ray have kept this from you for so long.” My heart started beating rapidly. “You and Aric have been betrothed since the day you were born, my darling.”
I sipped my herbal tea and nodded, partially in shock and, in a way, knowing that had been the truth all along. It had to be. “Did they kill Iona?” I asked.
“Oh no, dear!” I breathed a sigh of relief. “They just knew she was sickly and wouldn’t survive into your adulthood. Aric had struggled to fit in with some of the other children since arriving, and Ray wanted him to have his heart’s desire.” I didn’t say anything, so Grandmother continued. “I asked them to tell you on your trip to the stones at Orkney since Aric was with you and since they had been in Ros’s ear for so long at that point.”
I felt my teeth clenching as I looked up and into her eyes. “You mean Ros has been telling the truth? They told him I couldn’t marry and that he had to give me up, like he’s been saying since my wedding night?” Grandmother patted my hand and made the humming noise in her throat that she used to make when I needed coddling as a child. “We were fourteen,” I said more to myself than her. “Why didn’t they tell me?” I asked, knowing she didn’t have the answer.
“Maybe they wanted to see if you could love Aric organically and not feel bound by some predestined fate or prophecy,” she answered as she smoothed my hair. “Ray says your child is coming to lead the village to a new time.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Part of me wanted to stomp off to the stones, where I knew Ray was lurking this close to the solstice. Another part of me wanted to run as fast as I could to find Ros and leave with him, as he had begged. He had been honest with me about the Druids dissuading him from marrying me. Maybe he was the only one who had ever been truly honest with me. My heart ached for him, and I felt myself questioning everything. Suddenly, the courage he had shown to go against the Druids’ secret messages to him overshadowed the anger I had about him timing his declaration of love to my wedding night.
“I think a wise woman learns she cannot outrun her fate,” Grandmother said, as if reading my mind. My eyes widened at her, reflecting the fire across from us in their green, brown, and gold flecks, and in that moment, when we held one another’s gaze, something passed between us.
“It’s catching up to me,” I said, simultaneously questioning and answering myself.
“The map of your heart is changing, Ailsa. And nothing changes a heart more than a child.” She smiled, and I pulled away from her, not ready to share this secret that still belonged only to me. Perhaps only to me, I thought, remembering Ros’s look at the Beltane fire briefly.
“I should know,” she continued despite my physical and emotional distance. “I thought I knew grief when I lost my mother and my father to disease.” She shook her head, peering into my soul where I held such a similar pain. “But then I lost my child when your mother died so shortly after you were born, and I realized…I knew nothing about grief.” Her voice cracked as she said “nothing” through clenched teeth.
I reached back for her hand and held it in mine. Once my hand had been tiny in hers, and she had been able to wrap her fingers around it to envelop it completely. Now, her slim, bent fingers looked like a child’s hand in mine.
“The map of my broken heart has made new paths, islands, and valleys that I never wanted to know,” she said, looking from the fire to me.
I held her hand to my heart. “I am still learning the map of my heart, Grandmother, but I do know that you are my true north. I am thankful for you.”