Too short a visit! Auntie Ember returned to Larksville yesterday. Goodness, I miss her so much already, but what a lovely time we had together. I feel that I came to know her a little better, and she left me with a very special gift, one we made together and I know will serve me well in the future.
It was quite a thing to see Auntie Ember in Greenwood again, for you see, she grew up here alongside Mrs. Hume who is her best friend. When we were all at tea together, they talked of old times and called each other Ember and Martha like when they were girls. They spoke of sunny days spent getting into trouble, of the old apothecary who had taught Auntie Ember Impressional magic, and of Brandon Hoffman, Auntie Ember’s late husband. I did not know much about him. He died very young and she did not speak of him often, but it was sweet to see her remembering him. Her eyes sparkled as Mrs. Hume teased her about their courting days. “You were going to be our new apothecary, and he stole your heart and stole you away from Greenwood,” Mrs. Hume said. “Hopes change”, Auntie Ember answered smiling wistfully.
Auntie Ember and I enjoyed much of the springtime together. We drew Impressions in the morning mist, and she showed me the old spot on the edge of the forest where she used to gathered primroses. I told her of Lorenz and our search for the stone giant, as she picked the flowers. Later we used them to decorate a cake, and we laughed when I accidentally spilled flour all over the table. We even decided to take our tea outside as the clothes dried on the line. Oh, how pretty the sheets looked blowing in the wind, as we sat on the blanket in the grass. I ate a little piece of cake and Auntie Ember flipped though my book of faery tales, noting that I had had it for so many years now. She stopped on the tale of the tiny maiden and remembered how it had one of my favorites. Yes indeed, and it still is, but I remarked how sad it was that the little maid never found her way back to mother again. Just a story, but my heart grew so heavy in that moment, and Auntie Ember must have known in that way she so often does, for she closed the book and looked towards the forest…
She said “hope is a strange thing, Sonya”, and told me about when she was young. It was true what Mrs. Hume had said, that once, she had hoped to become the next apothecary for the village. But that was when she met her Brandon, so kind and handsome, and after they married, she hoped that they might make a family together. But he had left this world all too soon; it broke her heart and she thought her dreams of a family were over. Then Lettie had come to her, and not long after that, she found me on one of her visits back to Greenwood. “How funny the way hopes change, and how I found the family I didn’t think possible…” She said her life had at no turn gone how she’d expected. Now she had one girl married, working in her own dress shop, and the other doing the job she had hoped to do herself all those years ago. How funny it all seemed to her. She told me not be sad for her, not for the past and not for the present. She said she couldn’t be more happy or more proud than she was in that moment, and that her new hope was for her girls to be just as happy… and it seemed that they were, very much indeed.
Oh, but I had missed her so! I hugged her and asked if I had made her too lonely by leaving. “No, no” she said, called me her sweet girl, and told me that I was just where I was meant to be. I squeezed her tight and she patted my head. I had to follow my own path, seek the answers to my past, and find the next stone giant with “my nice, gentleman friend”. Then I must write home and tell her all about it. I promised.
Before Auntie Ember left, she asked me to aid her in the crafting of a new remedy: Hope; when we were finished with our work, she gave it to me. “This way,” she said, “you will be able to hold on to your hopes for the future and to remember the hopes I have for you.” It is such a sweet token to keep close as she leaves, and I will treasure it as I turn my mind towards my next task in the days to come.