Winter solstice (farewell)

According to Maggie, the yew tree at the end of the garden had been planted the day she was born. Standing in that very spot for seventy three years, four months and eighteen days. But a week before the winter solstice, on the day that Maggie died, the tree surrendered to a storm, was uprooted, and landed on its side, dead. Nora wasn’t partial to believing in the supernatural, but as she stood now before the wreckage of the tree, had to accept the strong synergy at work. 

‘Just think, Nor,’ Maggie would say to her. ‘My grandfather, your great-great grandfather, planted this tree in the ground. It symbolised new beginnings, the cycle of life and the everlasting movement of the seasons. And when you bring your grandchildren here, the legacy of the yew will stretch across seven generations, with you and I the connection between them all.’ 

Nature, however, clearly had other ideas. 

Maggie had always been a firm believer in the power of nature. From Maggie, Nora learned everything about the natural world. Maggie was so often in the garden she joked she was just one of the plants. During the summer, in her country garb and wide brimmed hat, she could be mistaken from afar for a scarecrow. She belonged in the land. Long days were spent gardening, and she always had mud under her nails and smelt of the sharp green chlorophyll tang of dandelions and freshly cut grass. Every day after school, rain or shine, and all through the school holidays, Maggie and Nora were an industrious pair: sowing seeds, reaping their harvest, turning piles of compost and pruning the trees. Nora had few memories of her grandmother in anything else than her gardening overalls, welly boots and big thick gloves. Winter, summer and each moment in between, she was out in the earth, embracing the elements and toiling with mother nature by her side. 

If Maggie taught Nora all about the natural world, it was through her grandmother’s close group of friends Nora learned of the supernatural world. Cackling, they called themselves the coven. Although Maggie brushed it off, telling Nora there was no such thing as the supernatural, claiming their little rituals were nothing more than an ode to a pagan past, a respectful interaction with nature and the power she wielded. Still, Nora kept her eyes peeled when they were over for their weekly Friday poker game for any eye of newt that might fall into her evening cup of cocoa. Their mysterious rituals fascinated her. The burning of sage when Angela had moved into her new cottage to ward away evil spirits. Washing their faces in the dew on the grass that fell on the first day of spring to keep themselves beautiful for the coming year. Throwing salt over one shoulder if they spilled it when cooking to blind the demons creeping behind them. Where Maggie celebrated the natural, the coven courted the supernatural, and sometimes Nora had difficulty separating the two. 

The coven were partly enthralled and partly spooked by the coincidence of the yew tree being felled by a storm on the day Maggie died. They were partly beguiled and partly scared by the funeral of their dear friend falling, a week later, on the winter solstice. The darkest day of the year.

‘Midwinter is a time of natural magic,’ Angela whispered to Nora as they gathered ahead of the ceremony. ‘All that sits between this world and the next is a delicate thread. We think there are walls between our worlds but the divide is as thin as the sheer woven spider web in the hedgerow, that we only notice when it’s covered in frosted dewdrops.’ 

‘It’s good Maggie died in midwinter,’ Nora said aloud, matter of factly, as they reached the little area designated a grave for her grandmother. Her mother, standing sharply upright, pale and milky, slid red rimmed eyes in her direction with a look of icy disdain. It sent a chill into Nora’s lungs like the harsh shock of drawing breath on winter days. Nora knew it was true, even if her mother couldn’t see it. But the glare silenced her, so she didn’t go on to explain why. Why it was so fitting for Maggie to die now. If she had to die, which was the inevitable fate that would meet us all. Maggie would understand. Or she would have. 

Her love of the sunshine never waned, but Maggie respected the cycle of life. Describing nature’s wintry decline in a way that made entropy seem romantic and beautiful, then captivating Nora’s imagination with poetic words to describe the hopeful passage of time from the shortest day to its slow creep back towards the light of spring. The respite that yule and midwinter offered, Maggie designated a gift of nature’s.

‘There’s not much that can flourish if it’s planted in the depths of winter,’ Maggie would tell Nora. ‘Nature encourages us to rest. As the trees drop their leaves and send their energy inwards to await spring, so we are encouraged to do the same. But that doesn’t mean nothing will grow, and there are some things we can still nurture in the garden,’ Maggie said. She then went on to teach Nora which bulbs could be committed to the earth in the depths of winter’s cool embrace.

Nora’s mother wouldn’t understand how at peace Maggie would be to slide away in the hiemal tract, even if her daughter painstakingly explained her reasoning. She and Nora’s grandmother never saw eye to eye. The green fingers certainly skipped a generation. Maggie assured Nora she had tried to teach her daughter to garden but nothing seemed to stick. If Maggie was summer, Dolores, Nora’s mother, was winter. So the seasons circled on, and Dolores lived in an eternal coldness of her own making. She was sharp as frost, so brittle when Nora attempted to hug her that the awkwardness of it removed any affection from what was meant to be a symbol of care and love. Maggie had been soft and round and perfect for big, warm, squishy hugs. The apple, it was clear, had fallen far from the tree. Maggie used to lament to her friends that Dolores was trapped. ‘Like an ice queen inside one of those glass snow globes,’ she would say sadly, at their poker nights. Maggie had felt it was her job to pick up the globe and shake it to release the snow, just to make something change, something shift. But Dolores was impenetrable and, after Nora’s father left, her wintry façade froze over. Even the rays of her mother’s love couldn’t melt her.

The winter solstice was the coldest day of the year, and the churchyard earth too frozen to dig into for a burial. There had been a lot of tutting amongst the coven about the folklore of not being buried deep enough, of what happened to bodies too close to the surface, or more tellingly, what happened to their souls. Although Nora had always been assured by Maggie they weren’t witches, that nothing went bump in the night, that the supernatural had no power over that which was natural, she was relieved when her mother acquiesced and agreed that Maggie’s body could be interred at the end of their vast garden, amongst a copse of trees, in the gaping hole caused by the yew tree being uprooted in the storm. And so it was that Maggie’s new beginning became her ending. That the tree planted to celebrate her birth was on the same site used to commit her body to its end. 

The coven chattered like a murder of crows, spewing out all sorts of things to be cautious about with burying a body on your own land, armed with remedies to protect Nora and her mother against the potentially marauding spirit of Maggie. Dolores snorted in derision when they were alone in the kitchen beforehand, preparing food for the wake. ‘As if your grandmother is going to haunt this place. She’d be happy to drop in on you, but she will be glad to be rid of me. She’s hardly going to spend her afterlife in my vicinity.’ But now, standing in the darkening day, with chill winds that picked up and whistled through the remaining tree branches, it was a setting that discomfited Nora. 

A small, sombre group of female mourners gathered around the grave to be. Maggie’s husband had died when Dolores was a baby, and the two women had clawed their way through life together ever since. Nora’s own father had been, as far as she could discern from the coven, a deadbeat, loser and waster, although Maggie hushed such talk and said at least he had known how to make Dolores smile. And laugh. A sound that had been lacking from their house ever since he’d left. Although Maggie had willingly let Nora sit in on the weekly poker games, she’d naively assumed Nora didn’t pick up the nuances of their more adult conversations. A belief Nora played up to so she could learn such truths as who in the coven purported themselves to be a practicing witch, what her mother did to scrape together a living, how poorly her father had acted in the break up, which segued into how evil all men truly were and, as a follow up, that Lesley was most likely her grandmother’s lover. Perhaps explaining why she stood now at the grave, looking greyer than the day and sadder than when she had lost her diamond earrings to a bluff hand. Beyond Lesley were the other coven members, a flame haired wiccan celebrant to manage the service, and a confused worker from the local garden centre who thought they were joking when she was employed to dig a grave. And of course, Dolores. Dolores who, despite her visible disdain for this process of seeing off her mother, had respected the wishes in the letter that greeted her along with the discovery of Maggie’s body, and had asked all the funeral goers to bring an item to bury with Maggie to see her into her next life.

Angela, aware of the folkloric threat of a midwinter burial, had brought a gold coin to bribe the reaper into blessing her friend’s soul. Maeve, in a similar vein, offered a wooden box containing crystals for Maggie to share with whomever she journeyed with to the next world. Lesley, in a mixture of rage and drama, had brought a snow globe of an ice queen and with a flourish sent it sailing into the grave, smashing on impact as she screeched ‘release’ into the wind, hands held high, as the crows excitedly shrieked with her, a ghostly noise that sounded like an eerie echo of her incantation. Nora pursed her lips, disapprovingly. She knew Maggie’s analogy for Dolores, and desperately hoped that her mother wasn’t also aware of it. Her mother stood, true to her accused form, like a statue made of ice, looking bleakly ahead, unmoving and unmoved. 

It was Nora’s turn to go next, she knew that much. She loved Maggie more than anything in the world. But despite their difference and distance, Dolores was still Maggie’s little girl. It would fall to her to have the final send off. Reaching into her pocket, Nora brought out a garlic bulb, and spread her fingers out to show the little party what lay in her palm.

Maeve made a small clucking noise, akin to shame, and cast her eyes around at the coven, realising what they had done. Joking and telling silly stories about ancient rituals was their thing, but to put the fear into Maggie’s granddaughter, well that was unthinkable. 

‘We’re just three silly old women telling silly, nonsensical stories, Nora,’ Maeve assured her. ‘There’s no truth in the folklore about midwinter burials or shallow graves. You should send something for your grandma that’s laced with love, not fear.’

‘You don’t need to ward off vampires or any such creatures,’ Lesley added. ‘Our Mags is going straight to heaven on a one way ticket. And trust me, her soul will be flying first class.’

‘It’s not to ward off evil,’ Nora informed them, thinking secretly to herself that if it were, she would have chosen something more potent than garlic after their teachings. ‘Maggie was a gardener, first and foremost. Everything she taught me was rooted in nature. It would be remiss of me not to plant garlic on the shortest day of the year, as we did every winter solstice. I thought she would approve of me sowing it alongside her.’

‘Sow garlic on the shortest day, harvest it on the longest day,’ her mother muttered. The first words she had said since the ceremony started.

‘Sorry?’ Nora said, turning to look at her, and then stepped back suddenly as a wail ripped from Dolores, who flung herself beside the grave, howling as if bewitched.

Lesley’s eyes guiltily flew from Dolores into the grave, looking at the scattered fake snow that sat among shards of glass, then darted back to her hands in wonderment, considering if she actually possessed the power to exorcise Dolores’ demons using a tacky souvenir. The coven all seemed uncertain, their eyes following the same trajectory, their bodies shrinking from the banshee-eque wailing emitting from the creature puddled on the earth in front of them.

Only Nora stepped forward to intervene. She trusted the voice in her head - Maggie’s - that had repeatedly told her there was no such thing as the supernatural. And she trusted, with her habit of listening intently to poker game gossip, that she knew the location of enough garden-grown remedies to whip up a quick protection talisman or expel a demon if required as a backup plan. But that would only come after a rational attempt to talk to her mother. She squatted down, hands touching the ground whose rhythms Maggie had drummed into her. Feeling with a shudder the cold of the soil to which her grandmother’s body had been surrendered.

‘What did you bring, mum?’ She asked, softly. ‘What do you want to send into the earth with Maggie?’

Dolores’ tear stained face didn’t surface. Her head was bowed, her body broken with grief. But her hand reached into the pocket of her black overcoat, and, trembling, emerged, gripped around something white. Fingers opened, revealing a second garlic bulb, sitting in the middle of her hand.

‘Vampire repellent?’ Lesley whispered to Maeve, who responded with a swift elbow to her friend’s ribs.

‘She would want us to reap what we can sow. It’s the shortest day, the day for planting garlic,’ Dolores explained. ‘It was the only thing I remembered from her gardening chats, and I just wanted to give her something to make her happy.’

Nora’s hand covered the small, white offering, and her other arm reached around to draw her mother up to standing. Together they threw their bulbs into the earth, to the place where the yew tree had been planted, as the celebrant began her reading, ‘For everything there is a time, a time to reap and a time to sow.’ They hadn’t sown a natural legacy that would last through the generations, nor was it a symbol of the circle of the seasons. But they didn’t need that. The last thing planted in this very spot, for that very purpose, hadn’t survived any longer than the person whose life it intended to celebrate. What they did have was each other. An understanding. And on the shortest, coldest day of the year, at the place where Maggie’s life celebrations had both begun and ended, the glow began to shine between the two women who followed from her; bound in grief, bound by nature, bound together.