Heart’s Ease

Elowen laid the pieces of the old tunic she had pulled apart on top of the cloth spread out on her kitchen table.  Using them as a pattern, she carefully cut new, larger pieces.

“Is that going to be my new tunic, Nana?” Annael asked, looking up from where he was sprawled on the floor next to his friend Turgon.  The two of them had been reluctant to come in out of the rain, but now they were happily engaged in drawing with the wax color sticks that her husband had brought home from his last trip to Esgaroth.

“Yes, it is,” she smiled at him. “You are growing so fast!”  He glowed with pleasure at having this accomplishment pointed out to him.

“My nana says I am growing too,” Turgon put in.

“Yes, you are,” Elowen agreed.

“And Legolas,” Annael added generously.  Legolas was late in coming to play, but he was not to be left out of the general commendations.

“And Legolas,” Elowen smiled at her son, and as if mention of his name had summoned him, there was a knock at the door that undoubtedly heralded Legolas’s arrival.  Elowen went down the hall to answer it and found Legolas and his caretaker, Nimloth, on her doorstep, both of them cloaked against the wet weather.

“Hello, sweetling,” Elowen greeted the child, and he turned his face up to smile shyly at her.  Without speaking, he held out a small pot of flowers.  “For me?” she asked, and he nodded.

“I made it for you yesterday,” he told her, a little breathlessly.  His blue eyes were anxious.

She took the pot from him and looked admiringly at the velvety Heart’s-ease flowers, their yellow and blue markings making them look like small, grave faces.  They were drooping a little, for despite the rain, the soil in the pot was dry.  Legolas probably had not watered them since he had potted them.  “They are beautiful,” she assured him, and his face broke into a broad smile.  “Annael and Turgon are in the kitchen,” she told him, and he skipped happily off down the hall to find his friends.

“I will be back for him soon,” Nimloth told her.  “I know it is late but he wanted to come.  I hope having those three indoors with you is not going to be too burdensome.”

Elowen laughed.  “At least when they are indoors, I know what they are up to.”  Nimloth smiled and took her departure, and Elowen carried the pot of flowers into the kitchen and placed it on a windowsill.  She took a moment to water them before she returned to her sewing.

“You are so late!” Turgon told Legolas, who had lain down on his stomach next to Annael and was now scribbling busily with an orange color stick.

“I was bad at lessons,” Legolas told him matter-of-factly.  Elowen grimaced a little as she cleared away the extra scraps of fabric and began to pin the pieces of the new tunic together.  Legolas was a bright little thing who had learned to read before Annael did, but nearly a year ago now, his mother had been killed by Orcs, and since then, all of his energy seemed to have gone into simply surviving his loss. Annael was now reading and writing with a growing vocabulary, if not always with accurate spelling, while Legolas seemed to have stopped with writing his name.

“What are you drawing?” Annael asked Turgon.  Elowen could just glimpse the paper over which Turgon was laboring: A large blue figure wiggled across it, with red and orange streaks shooting out from one end.

“It is a dragon!” Turgon cried.  “A very fierce one!”

“Let me see!” said Annael.  Turgon held the picture up, and Annael admired it for a moment and then looked down at the bright green scrawls on his own paper. “Mine is a giant spider,” he declared.

“Spiders are black,” Turgon said scornfully.  He evidently had more rigid standards for the color of spiders than dragons, Elowen noted with some amusement.

“Mine is green,” Annael maintained.  Annael liked green and had admired Elowen’s green dress just that morning.  He really is a Wood-elf, she thought fondly.

“What are you drawing, Legolas?” Turgon asked, evidently giving up on educating Annael about spiders.

There was a second’s silence, and Elowen glanced up from her work to find that Legolas had stopped drawing and was looking down at his own paper with trouble in his face.  “Maybe Orcs,” he ventured softly.

“You three should stop drawing monsters and draw something beautiful,” Elowen intervened hastily.

All three of them turned their faces up to hers.  “Beautiful?” Turgon said doubtfully.

“Yes, beautiful,” she said firmly.  She walked over to them and put clean pieces of paper in front of each of them. “On a rainy day like this, I really would like to see some beautiful drawings.”

“I can draw you something beautiful, Nana,” Annael declared enthusiastically and reached again for a green color stick.  Turgon hesitated for only a second before picking up a red stick and beginning to make wide, sweeping marks, with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth in concentration.

Legolas continued to look at her for a long moment. She smiled at him reassuringly, and, hesitantly, he smiled back.  Then he bent his head to his paper, and his blond hair fell forward so she could not see his face.

Elowen finished pinning the pieces of the new tunic together and moved to rocking chair near the fire to begin stitching it.  The fire hummed soothingly, and the children worked quietly for a while as she worked her needle in and out of the fabric.

Then she heard Annael ask, “Turgon, what is that?” Even from where she sat, Elowen could see that Turgon’s paper was a riot of colors.  Red, orange, yellow, and purple filled the sheet and threatened to jump off the edges.

Turgon looked at it with satisfaction. “I do not know,” he said, “but it is beautiful.”

The other two dissolved in giggles, but Turgon did not seem to care.  Annael was now writing something carefully at the bottom of his drawing, and Legolas was peeking over his shoulder and then writing on his own paper.  A knock at the door drew Elowen to her feet again.

When she went to the door, she found Nimloth, standing in pale afternoon sunlight. “The weather has turned lovely after all,” she said.

“So it has,” Elowen agreed.  “Legolas!” she called. “Nimloth is here for you.”

After a moment’s scramble, Legolas and Turgon both appeared with drawings clutched in their hands and wet cloaks draped over their arms and dragging on the floor.  “My nana will want my beautiful picture,” Turgon declared, looking at it again with satisfaction.

“I am sure she will,” laughed Elowen. She let him out and then turned to Legolas.  He was looking at her sideways with his head tilted.

“Good bye,” he said softly. “I had a lovely time.”

She laughed.  “Come again, elfling,” she said and impulsively kissed the top of his head.  He flushed and smiled with pleasure and then followed Nimloth out the door.

Elowen went back down the hall to the kitchen where Annael was just laying his picture carefully on the table. “Look, Nana,” he said. “I made it for you.”

She looked at the paper and saw what was obviously a tree, with green leaves curling across the top half of the paper sturdily supported by a brown and black trunk.  Ah yes, my little Wood-elf, she thought. And then she read the writing across the bottom: “I lov you nana Annael.”

And suddenly she felt enormous gratitude for this child who had been given into her care. She turned to where he was waiting and bent to hug him and kiss his brow.  “I love you, too, Annael.”  He giggled and wriggled free.

“Can I play in the garden now?” he asked.  “It has stopped raining.”

“Go ahead,” she said, and he ran off.

Holding the picture carefully, she started across to the chest near the window but suddenly stopped, for she saw that there was another drawing on the seat of the rocking chair.  One of them has forgotten it, she thought, and picked it up.

The picture was identifiably of a person, and looking at it, she realized that it was a picture of her.  The figure in it wore a green dress and had brown braids tied with green ribbons.  The grey embroidery on the dress had been painstakingly imitated with thin black lines, and the braids had little x’s drawn through their length to show the woven strands of hair.  And at the bottom of the drawing was written in wobbly script:  “I lov you Annael nana Legolas.”

Elowen stared at the picture, and tears suddenly stung her eyes. She blinked and then walked over to the window and opened the chest beneath it.  She lifted out the tablecloths that lay on top, revealing a pile of treasures underneath: a ragged baby blanket, a pair of impossibly tiny knit boots, a silver betrothal ring.  She placed Annael’s picture among these things and carefully smoothed it out.  Then, with only a second of hesitation, she added the other picture, put the tablecloths back, and closed the chest

She stood to look out the window at Annael playing by himself in the wet garden.  And then she saw the pot of Heart’s-ease on the windowsill.  The little blue and yellow flowers had begun to lift their heads and turn again to the warm light of the sun.