March — The Blessing of Flowers and Seeds
The closer it got to the spring equinox, the more animated the Grand Hall of the Hearth became, engulfed in a flurry of activities related to sprucing up, clearing and decorating it for the arrival of the Twins. Every now and then one of the Caretakers went out into the yard, to check if the ice on the pond had thinned, or even melted, gazing intently at the space above it in the hope of seeing two snow flurries, the last of the last snow, fall into the water, the sign that marked the blessed event every year.
Every Caretaker hoped to be the lucky one who could announce that the Two had arrived, but it never worked that way; by the time they rushed to the Hall to tell the others the good news, the Twins were always somehow already there. This year was no different. Regardless of the time differential between the Twins’ arrival and the belated announcement of said event, the thrill of being the one who saw the snowflakes fall into the pond still held its charm, and this year it was Aifa.
She saw those snowflakes, and she thought she must be mistaken, but before she even had time to make up her mind to go tell the others, she heard laughter and running in the Grand Hall, accompanied by excited gasps and sounds of celebration.
Aifa didn’t even know how she got there, to experience the mystery that unfolded every year at the end of the last snow of spring: the Twins were there, Ama and Jal, the eternal children who the Caretakers had the great privilege to nurture.
They were so young, Ama and Jal, three years old, maybe, one couldn’t tell. They looked so much alike, it was difficult to tell them apart, not to mention figure out which one of them was a girl, and which one a boy. They wore the same garments, some sort of flowing, knee length tunic gathered around their waist with a belt. Their hair was the color of chestnuts, so long that it trailed behind them, sweeping the stone floors of the Great Hall. Their beauty was almost surreal, their features were neither male, nor female, although they could have easily been either, and their pale eyes, watching the world with intense curiosity, without the slightest hint of guile, were the only characteristic that could help somebody tell them apart: Ama’s eyes were green, like the ocean at sunset, and Jal’s were blue, a very light blue, almost clear, one could say the color of spring water, if water had a color.
They didn’t speak much, even though they seemed to know the language of Cré very well. Theirs was a simple vocabulary, and they spoke the way a very young child, no older than three or four, would, without any of the complex syntax structures an educated person would avail themselves of.
Since their arrival they hadn’t stopped moving for even a minute, even though it was past midnight already, and Aifa started to get the idea that her grandmother was trying to convey to her, that the work of the Caretaker knew no rest.
Emotionally, they were the age of three, and they acted like it, including, but not restricted to, not wanting to go to sleep, come what may, and it was absolutely exhausting to try to distract and cajole two immortal toddlers to stop thrashing on the floor and go night-night.
The atmosphere was simply surreal, and Aifa looked out of the corner of her eye, to see if the other Caretakers found this scene weirder than weird, but they didn’t seem to find anything out of the ordinary with the Twins, grace to the fact that they had gone through this yearly cycle several times, and this level of weird was exactly what they expected to see.
It was almost impossible to believe that by the end of fall, when the first true snowflakes of winter fell into the pond and it was time for them to go, the Twins would be highly enlightened avatars, whose teachings of wisdom added new tomes every year to the ever growing city library.
For now, however, they were the classic example of the tired toddlers who needed to spend their last drop of energy on a nightmarish tantrum, just so they could finally be exhausted enough to fall asleep.
Two hours later, and almost shaking with effort after having to chase them around the Hall and convince them not to step outside without shoes, Aifa dropped to the floor, dead tired, and thinking that this Caretaker business was not exactly what she dreamed it would be.
Things settled down in a week or two, after the Twins had time to adjust a bit to their new surroundings, and not a moment too soon, because the Dawn of the Flowers and Seeds was right around the corner. This celebration, which, simply put, was the spring equinox, was a source of great excitement for everybody, but especially the young members of society, who had been cooped up indoors all winter, and were chomping at the bit to go out into nature and smell the flowers.
Aifa had two tasks, potentially manageable individually, but impossible to perform at the same time: to take care of the Twins, which was a round the clock mission, and to find a beautiful clearing, filled with flowers, and large enough for the entire community to celebrate the return of spring. She took a trip outside the city gates, Twins in tow and hoping for the best, to find the perfect location for the event, and the two hours she had allocated for this task turned to four, and then six, and eight, because the Twins’ attention kept being pulled in so many directions by spring flowers and tree blossoms, and clearings with soft grass, surrounded by shrubs whose swelling buds had burst open recently to reveal the beginnings of tiny, crude green foliage.
When she finally found it, she knew immediately it was the right place: a slightly sloping meadow, looking out to the sea, overtaken by clumps of yellow daffodils, so large and close together they looked almost like a carpet of flowers. The excitement of the discovery was overshadowed by the fact that the Twins liked it too, and for this reason didn’t want to leave it, even after they gathered numerous bunches of daffodils and watched the moon rise high up in the sky. When they finally got back to the Hearth, the Twins were so tired they couldn’t settle down, and by the time Aifa got to her own home, she was so exhausted she wanted to cry. She thought about complaining to her grandmother, but the latter had already noticed, without a single word.
“Why do you think we need new people every year? They can squeeze the last drop of soul energy out of you, especially early in the year. Get some rest and let somebody else take care of them for a while.”
Aifa took her advice and put the time to good use to prepare for the Dawn of Flowers and Seeds. She prepared her pouch of seeds, to carry good luck for that year’s harvest, and her bunch of spring flowers, to attract grace and beauty, and a basket of eggs, in every color of the rainbow, so that the animals would be healthy and multiply.
They had to leave before the sun was up, to arrive in the clearing at dawn, and when the sun rose over the horizon, everything turned rose and lavender, the daffodils, the grass, their flowery dresses, everything but the Twins’ eye color, which gleamed even brighter, in the way the sea turns luminescent when the sun rays skim its surface at sunset.
During the blessing of the flowers and seeds the two had been surprisingly well behaved, if one didn’t take into account their constant running around afterward, when they chased each other and ran over people’s picnic blankets. Aifa got a sudden burst of gratitude, mixed with guilt, for her own mother, and thought that if she was even half the piece of work the Twins were during her early years, her mother definitely deserved to be nominated for sainthood.
“I’ve kept an eye on children at other times,” she didn’t even realize she said it out loud, “but I never remember it being even a fraction of the trials these two are putting me through.”
“Of course, child. What did you expect? They are, for lack of a better term, godly creatures, who mature and reach enlightenment in nine months. This task requires a tremendous amount of energy, but you’ll be able to carry more rational conversations with them in a short while. In the meantime, do you remember what I told you, about those years when they were harmed?”
“Natural disasters, floods, droughts?” Aifa recited.
“Exactly. It is not your task to educate them, they will take care of that themselves, for the most part, they are always self-taught. Your task is to keep them alive and in one piece. That’s all you have to do. What a monumental task that is!” she contemplated the two while they ran as fast as they could towards the edge of a small, but still dangerous ravine, and stopped their game of chicken closer and closer to the edge. “Anyway, I’m sure divinity is involved in their care in a lot more active fashion than it would be for a normal person.”
“How long have you been a Caretaker, doyenne?” Aifa asked.
“Since I was your age, dear. I’ve seen so many pairs of Twins,” she waxed nostalgic. “No two are ever the same. Every year I expect a repeating pattern, something recognizable from one year to the next, but it never happens. Every spring they get born anew, with no recollection or built in knowledge from their past. I don’t know why, but this always makes me sad.”
“Why, doyenne?”
“Wouldn’t it be horrible to live the same year, again and again, for millennia, and not even be able to remember it? Maybe it’s a blessing they don’t remember it, if they have to start with a clean slate every spring.”
“Haven’t they made any progress?” Aifa asked.
“Oh, a lot of progress indeed, they learn faster and faster, which gives them more time to think and create, but when all is said and done, it’s still only nine months.”
“They don’t look unhappy,” Aifa tried to cheer her up.
“Oh, of course not, dear. They are superior beings, sadness is a feeling only us humans experience. I don’t think they can get happy either, they just are,” grandmother commented.
Aifa looked at the two frolic in the field of daffodils and thought they looked happy enough to her. She breathed a sigh of relief that the two kept each other company and she didn’t have to jump to attention every time they found a new flower, or a bug, or a four leaf clover. Everything in nature looked miraculous to them, and they needed to share their wonder constantly, with inexhaustible stamina.
“But after all the fuss, would you just look at them?” she nudged Aifa to look at the way the sun was shining in Ama and Jal’s hair. “Have you ever seen more beautiful beings?”
Just as she gazed lovingly upon them, Ama tripped, fell and started screeching with sounds nobody believed could come out of a human mouth.
“Duty calls,” Aifa got up, sighing, to tend to the girl, only to realize, when she gazed into her eyes, now full of tears, that she was in fact looking at Jal.
She could never get used to the fact that she had to tap them on their shoulder and make them turn around, in order to be able to tell which one of them she was talking to.
“So, how do you feel about having children of your own one day?” grandmother teased her.
“I don’t know what to say,” Aifa replied thoughtfully. “After a few generations of these two, if I’m still breathing at the time, raising human children who actually start out small and grow up after a reasonable amount of time should be a piece of cake.”
She finished negotiating the peace between Ama and Jal, so that both of them would stop wailing, and returned to the picnic blanket, next to her grandmother, to finally take a bite out of her piece of fruit.
