The Present Read online

“Why would I want to eat a flower? It is a flower, isn’t it?” She held it up by the spindle as if by a stem. “So beautiful! But why so heavy?” She put it down in the grass.

  Saffron leaned her elbows on her knees, settling in for a chat. “Have you received many other gifts this season, Grandmother?”

  “Oh, glories and glories of them! Carved ivory spoons from Leon, and from Mama a red sash, and my husband gave me the most lovely string of cowrie shells…” Grandmother fumbled at the soft folds of her neck, looking puzzled. “I must have left it inside…” She noticed the spindle lying on the ground and leaned toward it, bright-eyed. “What’s that?” She touched it. “Where did this pretty thing come from? Is it a wheel?” She rolled the whorl along the grass while the long end of the spindle wobbled in air. “It seems like a wheel, but where is the other one?”

  “I’ll make you another one.”

  “Why, little sister, that’s very sweet of you. And clever. How did you learn to make wheels, Ilex?”

  Rather than answer, Saffron pointed. “Look, Grandmother, on the far slope.” A herd of roe deer had come out to graze.

  Grandmother peered. “What are those red things? Have the calves gotten loose again?”

  “They’re deer, Grandmother.”

  “No, they’re deer! I must tell Leon.” But she gazed at the russet forms moving in the distance with eyes that seemed to look even farther, toward some distant ocean, a misty island, a cloud on the horizon. She murmured, “But Leon will take his bow and arrows to shoot them, and they are too beautiful. No, I will not tell Leon. I love the roe deer.”

  “I love you,” Saffron said quietly, knowing that it made no difference. Unhappy. Wanting something she could no longer have. Yet beginning to sense that she had been given something immensely else instead.

  Still gazing at the deer, Grandmother said, “So graceful. So liquid their eyes. I—” The old, old woman frowned, her face struggling. “I knew—somebody…”

  Her own daughter, whom she had named after the most beautiful of deer—and that way lay pain. So, as a distraction, Saffron said, “Grandmother, look what I have brought you,” and she picked up the spindle again.

  Grandmother blinked at it. “What a funny mushroom!”

  “Don’t try to eat it, Grandmother. It’s not a mushroom.”

  “I’ve never seen one with such a skinny stalk.” The ancient woman took the pottery circle by the stick, peering at the spindle, a tool she had used since she was Saffron’s age, with all the mystery and zest of life in her pleated face. “It’s not a mushroom at all. What is it, dear?”

  “It just is.” Dear. With a dawning sense of wonder Saffron realized that Grandmother’s heart remembered everyone she loved, although not by name. More: without her own lapis-bead life hanging too long and heavy around her neck, Grandmother…I may not be happy, but she IS. Grandmother was quite happy. And how not? Every day, every moment of every day, Grandmother rediscovered the world. Always new, always now. So it must have been in the vast beginning of which the wise women around the fire had spoken, in the time before time or memory.

  “What a beautiful thing,” Grandmother declared, smiling upon a pottery circle with a symmetrical design glazed red, yellow, blue. “So many dear, dear things people give me.”

  Saffron nodded. “The greatest gifting,” she said softly, more to herself than to her grandmother, “is today. Each day. The present.”