“Henry is a wanderer and a wastrel, you know. If you marry him, you will be unhappy everyday of your life,” says Thomas as he leans by the hearth an hour before he usually rises. He is my oldest brother, who despite his harsh judgment of the man I love, really does care for me.

But knowing this only makes the pain, shame, and rage that twist my gut worse. I stare at the fire, stirring the porridge, trying to ignore him.

Henry’s reputation is my fault.

Thomas touches my shoulder—in sympathy? Or does he want a response? But I can’t explain my guilt and shame. My boots are on and my shawl is by the door. I quickly grab the end of yesterday’s loaf and tell him to make his own breakfast.

Why am I so mad at him? I know why I hate myself. I should never have told Henry, once I thought it was too late, that I’d always believed that he would go see the world before settling down and that if he had, I would have been old enough to be his bride.

Revealing my hidden secret changed him.

It was all my fault. My fault he left his home and his family and his new wife, my sister.

And it is my fault he has come back, ten years later.

The path I’m taking leads to either the waterfall, dry this time of year, or to a glade full of pansies. Perhaps I will choose the glade today, but I don’t have to choose yet. Or perhaps I will just wander around until I come across some other fleeting beauty which those others who live their lives in the village will never see nor understand.

How did things get beyond our control? Our relationship started out innocently enough. Henry, like many village lads, hated the work that is the lot of every male old enough to wield an axe or hoe. Sowing, harvesting, shearing the sheep, and other group chores that happen only once or twice a year aren’t that hard to get the lads to do, they see it as a rite of passage. But no one like to mend fences, lead the sheep and cows to their fields, cut firewood, and fix roofs and walls of barns and houses—the things that keep the village farm running.

Unlike many lads his age, Henry woke early and finished his chores before lunch, then he would spend his free time before evening chores daydreaming in an abandoned cottage just inside the woods.

That’s where I met him. Not met really, I’d known him all my life; his family lived next door. That forbidden house was where I got to know him.

When I was eight, Mama had a really rough pregnancy and the babies, twins, were sickly. Aunt Martha, a widow, moved in with us to take care of the house. I was no longer a babe and I might have been put in charge of my younger siblings, but Nell was thirteen and Cousin Sarah was a year older; they took over. I was too old to be watched and unneeded to watch, so I began to wander. One spring day, cold rain forced me into the cottage Papa had warned me against.

Inside sat Henry, leaning against a crate looking at the sky. If he was surprised, he’d not shown it. But he did move a bit so I could share the view. We sat in silence until the rain let up and then he said the wished he could visit the dessert of Numbira, where he’d heard it rained only once a year, but then for two solid weeks. I listened to his hopes and dreams, places he wanted to see, things he wanted to do, all of which could only be done if he left home.

Day after day, I came to the cottage to see him, though the long summer and fall. Even in the dead of winter, during those few hours of light, I would find him there. When the winter chill first took my breath, he pulled me under a blanket he brought and held me against his chest like my older brothers had recently stopped doing. Then Henry asked me what I wanted from life.

I told him things I’d not even told Mama, that someday I wanted to learn to read, that I wanted to climb a tall mountain and look down at the land around me, that I didn’t want to spend my life raising chickens, children, and sheep, that I wanted, at least once in my life, to eat an orange.

He didn’t laugh or scold, but agreed with everything, adding that if he ever left the village he would learn to read and teach me.

For four years I met him secretly, sharing hopes, dreams, and long comfortable silences. I was closer to him than to any of my real siblings. He let me complain, something I wasn’t allowed to do at home. In the winter we cuddled for warmth, in the summer we sat around in our underclothes.

I did not find it odd when Nell started spending time with him. I thought he would finally become the older brother I wanted. Or thought I wanted.

Nell said she was having Henry’s baby and he married her, moving her in with his family, but I would still meet him. That winter, I turned twelve and my body began to change. By summer the monthly pain was bad enough to keep me abed, but as I got no sympathy at home, I went the one place that I knew would take my mind off my troubles. I remember clearly our last day together.

Henry was shirtless, still dripping with sweat when I arrived. He wiped it off with his shirt and told me to make myself comfortable. I tried to settle down against the wall beside the window, but the pain when I sat was so great I almost leapt to my feet.

“Whoa, Polly. What’s wrong?”

“Just pains,” I said, my face heating up. “Mama says all girls get them. Mine just came early.”

“Oh,” said Henry with a smile, “you’ve become a woman.”

“No, I’ll leave that task to a man.”

I expected him to laugh, but he caught his breath and stared at me.

“Oh, Henry,” I said, growing uncomfortable under his gaze. I tried to sit back down again. “I knew it would happen sooner or later, but I hoped it would be later. Mama is already trying to get me to say who I like, even though she’s told me I was marrying Paul for as long as I can remember.”

He walked away from me, then turned back quickly. “Do you want to?”

“Not really,” I said in all honestly. But then I let my tongue run away with me and I told him my deepest secret. “I’d hoped you’d go exploring and come back when I turned seventeen. Then you would have married me instead of Nell.”

He face froze, as if I’d slugged him, and he turned away, pacing the floor like he meant to wear a hole in it.

The crickets outside the window had never been louder and the smell of hot blackberries still on the vine perfumed the air as he said, “Don’t come tomorrow.”

He’d told me this before and I’d always obeyed, but that day it seemed so final. Like it was a goodbye.

I left, wandering around the woods in a daze. I didn’t come home until dusk. Nell, seven months with child, was in our kitchen in tears. Dan, a widower with two small children, waited outside. I was spared the need to look surprised because Nell assumed I’d already heard that Henry had released her from their marriage and had left her for good.

I lived though torture that night knowing my sister’s sobs were all my fault. Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut?

At sunrise, I left the house and spent the day searching out all my old haunts, even the once I’d not visited, the ones I’d not needed, since I’d found the cottage. And Henry.

The waterfall was silent; the heat of summer had dried up the winter creek. The hollow full of violets had been plowed under. My favorite glade was surrounded by stumps.

Everything was changing, none of it for the better. In the heat of the day, driven by my sleepless night and growing hunger I sought the one place I vowed never to visit again. As I came to the cottage, I was shocked to see Henry, pack over his shoulder, walking away. Why hadn’t he left before? Why wait a full day after freeing Nell? Was he waiting for me? Why? He’d told me not to come. I stood rock still as I watched him disappear into the trees. I’d not even thought to follow him. I could not even tell if he had really been there or if he was just a vision of my loss, my guilt, and my shame.

How long I stood there, I’ll never know, but deep shadows fell everywhere by the time I turned to go home. Mama and Aunt Martha, so worried about my sister and the baby she was carrying never gave me a second glance.

After he left, I continued to disappear during the day. I found new haunts and rejoiced each time I found them still undisturbed.

Every beauty and joy is fleeting. We must remember that even a misplaced word can destroy them. And time, even without human action, is good at stealing these fragile things from us, even as it brings us new ones. The Seasons, the Earth, Time does not care what we cling to, so it is best to keep our distance and know that we can find beauty and joy where we look for them.