[Eleanor]: 668.Amelia.Chapter I

I.

In a village on the shore of a lake of crystal-clear water that spilled from the mountains in a spray of rainbows, there lived a beautiful maiden named Amelia. Her hair was a curtain of deepest auburn that turned to flames in the slanting rays of the setting sun; her eyes were dove grey, her unblemished complexion fair and her lips a rose kissed by the morning dew. She was slim and graceful as the swan which glided over the moonlit surface of the lake, its silvery whiteness a mere reflection of her own perfection; and when she sang or laughed, one heard silvery bells pealing on the clear, evening air. 

Now, before I go any further with my tale, some of you will want to know when and where it takes place. I could name a year and jab at a spot on a much-creased map and say, “There, that village by that lake.” But these facts would not add to the telling, for this is a fable that can happen any place, any time, and still be just as true. Perhaps the steam engine had been developed, but no factories figure in this story; no one travels by train or lights his home with electricity. Perhaps very wealthy have gas lights in their great houses, but ordinary people rely on candles and oil lamps for illumination. Farmers bring their produce to market by horse-drawn wagon and the millers’ wheels are powered by water and wind. It is a simpler time, people work hard and do with less, and it is in this world that our tale takes place.

As for Amelia, she was not always so beautiful, for she was a merely pretty child. With her friends she spent warm summer days swimming in the mountain lake and gathering wild flowers in the meadow which they braided into necklaces and wreaths in the long evenings for each other’s hair. During the cold winters she made snow angels in the drifts that covered the yards, skated on the frozen surface of the lake, and sipped her grandmother’s hot broth by the fire as she waited for her chilled toes to thaw. There was no want in the young girl’s life. There was ever enough to eat and a roof over her head, and while her parents were busy providing for their household, it was Amelia’s grandmother who looked after them all, who bandaged Amelia’s skinned knees and dried her tears, helped her with her homework, and taught her to play the harp. 

Amelia’s was a musical family. Her father had been a much sought-after tenor soloist in his younger days, performing at village weddings both during the ceremony in the little white church with the steeple on the village green, and afterward at the celebration, singing with whichever musical troupe was hired for the occasion. It was there that he met the beautiful young woman with fiery-red hair who became his wife and Amelia’s mother, a flutist traveling with one such group of musicians. She gladly gave up the itinerant lifestyle she had been leading, and instead advertised for flute students whom she taught in their parlour. Her husband’s parents had died and left him their house and the grocery which provided their livelihood, and after Amelia came, her widowed grandmother left her own home in the provinces to live with her daughter’s new family. Besides the harp, Nana also taught the young Amelia how to knit, sew, darn socks, cook, and help in the garden. When upset or hurt, the child ran to her grandmother for the comfort and care her own mother was too busy to administer, and never dreamed there would come a day she would no longer be able to do so.

As they worked side by side in the garden one hot summer afternoon when Amelia was nine, Nana swept a strand of gray hair off her forehead and sat back on her heels, surveying her granddaughter. She could see the woman Amelia would become, knowing that she would not live to see that day. Her heart was weak from a childhood illness, but she told no one, especially not Amelia. Just as the girl was about to pull out a bean plant from the ground, mistaking it for a weed, Nana stayed her hand.

“Amelia,” she reproved, “what will you do when I am no longer here to keep you out of trouble?”

“Why?” asked the child. “Are you going away?”

“No, sweetie, but I won’t live forever.” She took off her gardening glove and wiped some dirt from Amelia’s face where she’d rubbed it with her hand.

“Why won’t you live forever?” asked the girl. “Why do people have to die at all?”

Nana sighed. “Imagine if everyone kept having babies and no one ever died; soon the village, and the country, and then the whole world would be so crowded that no one would have any room to move around. There wouldn’t be room to grow vegetables or pasture sheep and cows, and all those people would get very hungry without enough to eat.” Amelia watched her grandmother with large eyes. “Then those people would start fighting each other for food and living space, and what old age and sickness had ceased doing, war would accomplish in a much worse manner.”

“I’m never having babies,” declared Amelia. “That way I won’t have to die!”

Nana shook her head and smiled at her granddaughter. “I’m sorry, my love,” she said softly, “but it doesn’t work that way. Someday I will get old and my body will just wear out; but you will live for a long time afterward, because you are young and healthy.”

Amelia flung herself into her grandmother’s arms. “No!” she cried. “You can’t die, ever! Who will look after me?”

“That’s what I just asked you,” crooned Nana, stroking Amelia’s auburn hair. “What will you do when I am no longer here? I’ve taught you many useful things. Do you think you can remember them all?”

Amelia looked up into her grandmother’s kindly face. “If you die, Nana,” she said earnestly, “then I will die, too, so we never have to be apart.”

Nana hugged her granddaughter and smiled, confident that she would not make good on that promise. The child loved life too much, and the older woman counted on that to carry her through when the inevitable happened.