Rowan

Blythe had always known what interested her.

The vineyards.

The press.

The strange, precise moment when fruit ceased merely growing and became ready to be gathered.

Rowan knew mostly what did not interest her.

She disliked the press.

She found the merchants exhausting.

And she had no desire to stand before the valley ringing bells.

Behind their family house, however, there was a walled garden that few people visited.

Fig trees grew there.

They were old, low-branched things whose roots had lifted sections of the stone path and whose leaves were large enough to hide a child's face.

Rowan spent hours beneath them.

Her grandmother taught her how to tell when the fruit was ready.

“Don't look at the color,” she said.

“Then how do you know?”

Her grandmother took Rowan's hand and placed her fingers beneath the neck of a fig.

“Ask it.”

Rowan laughed.

But she understood eventually.

A ripe fig softened before it changed much in appearance. Its weight shifted. Its neck began to bend. Sometimes the smallest crack appeared near the base.

The most important changes happened where no one could see them.

Rowan liked that.

Years passed.

In their family, each child of the Keeper was expected eventually to declare what responsibility she would take within the valley.

Blythe had chosen early.

Rowan did not.

At nineteen, she asked for another year.

At twenty, she did the same.

By twenty-one, people had stopped describing her as thoughtful and begun calling her indecisive.

Some suggested she work beside Blythe.

Others proposed the accounts, the market house, the orchards.

One councillor told her gently that there was no shame in admitting she lacked her sister's certainty.

Rowan thanked him.

Then returned to the fig garden.

That summer was unusually hot.

The fruit developed quickly, but its appearance barely changed.

Growers from neighboring estates began cutting figs open to judge them.

Perfectly good fruit accumulated on tables, split in half simply to prove that the rest might be ready.

Rowan watched this for several days.

Then she asked why they needed to cut open something they already knew how to read.

“To be certain,” someone told her.

She thought about that answer for a long time.

A few weeks later came the annual gathering at which Rowan was once again expected to declare her future.

This time, she attended.

She wore the same autumnal color that had appeared in portraits of women in her family for generations.

Around her head she arranged branches from the fig garden.

Leaves extended outward in every direction.

Fruit hung among them.

Everyone assumed the extravagance meant she had finally prepared some grand announcement worthy of Blythe.

Rowan stood before them.

“I will keep the garden,” she said.

There was a pause.

The walled garden had never required a Keeper.

It had no merchants.

No bell.

No public ceremony.

No one had ever considered it important enough to inherit.

Someone asked what she intended to make of it.

Rowan answered:

“Nothing.”

The room became very quiet.

She explained that the trees did not need improving.

The garden did not need expanding.

Its value did not depend upon becoming larger, more profitable, or more visible.

She wanted only to learn it well enough that it could remain.

One of the councillors asked whether she truly wished to spend her life tending something that almost no one would ever see.

Rowan looked toward Blythe.

Her sister was smiling.