The Last Hope

2

As soon as I turned around I saw what looked like an old wooden box with an intricate marquetry depicting flowers. When I gave it a closer look I recognized they were spring crocuses and hyacinths. Immediately my grandmother's voice echoed into my head: "these, Cissi, are also known as "penitent's roses", they remaind us that we need to purge our wrongdoings, it does not matter if it takes us our whole lives or the ones of our descendants, we simply must do so" she told me twelve years ago while we were hiking in the mountains and happened to past right next to a group of newly born crocuses; another time, when we drove by a flower shop she said, indicating a bunch of flowers: "people that consider hyacinth a symbol of happiness infuriate me" she said irritably to me "you must know Cissi that it is the ultimate symbol of sorrow: Hyacinthus, the most beautiful man on which the god of the Sun had set his sight upon, made the mistake fall in love with Apollo and reject the gods of the wind; they were happy...
Hyacinthus' peaceful dark blue eyes were the only ones able to calm down the fiery temper of the Sun; seeing them together was like watching the end of the sunset, when the flaming colours of the sun blend with the gloominess of the night and the sky gets tinged by that ethereal, serene lilac on which the shy golden stars peep out;
but, during a game of discus, the mighty god Apollo threw with his inhuman strength through the stadium and the jelous gods of the wind deviated its trajectory right into Hyacinthus' bare chest; the boy blew his last breath into the arms of his immortal lover and, when Apollo's wrathful tears mixed with his dead soulmate's blood, vibrant dark purple flowers, so different from the lilac symbol of their love, bloomed from the earth beneath them, and the weeping god announced with broken voice that they would be called hyacinths in honour of his lover".
Pretty dark story to tell to a seven year old child, right?
But that's just how my grandmother had always been.

My grandma's name is Sage and I don't think a more appropriate name could have been chosen for her. She is the smartest women I know. She knows everything, even the little things that would seem insignificant to modern eyes, like which type of dish was Leonardo Da Vinci's favourite; she is particularly fond of the natural world (flowers, rocks, constellations, animals, ecc.) but not necessarily with what we would call a scientific approach. She loves ancient myths and tales that explaine life as the product of ancient gods and goddesses' work (especially if they are greeks and romans), stories of the hidden meaning behind nature that spoke of powerful forces residing and connecting all living beings.
Not to mention her passion for art in all of its forms since, as she often says quoting Aristotle, "Art not only imitates nature, but it also completes its deficiencies", meaning that art is the missing voice of what nature lacks to speak. She and I have the same smart, cryptical smile although her's is surrended by a network of smile lines and wrinkles, testaments to her full life. People are intimidated by her, she radiates some sort of ancient powerful aura that demands respect; she says she doesn't understands why people act like that, that her name also means "moderate, poised" but I know that her wit gets sharp very easily, that she is very demanding and that her rage, even though extremely rare, is terrifying.

I'm her only granddaughter and she always made a point to teach me everything that, according to her, I needed to learn: myths, tales, foreign languages, art and much more. My father and her don't get along, she always thought he was too little for my mum, too simple, not special enough for her beloved Andrea. This sentiment had always been there, between them, but everything got out of hand when my mum died. I don't remember much of the incident itself, all I know is that one day my mum called me from Athens to wish me a happy birthday and the next, police men stood outside of my door telling my father that my mum had died in a terrible landslide on the archeologist site she was working on... She was an archaeologist, well actually she was the best archeologist of the last century but I barely knew her, I was 8 when she died and she had always been working all around the world.

Two days after we got word of the tragedy, grandma came to our house and started shouting furiously at my dad about how he shouldn't have let my mum go alone, about how he didn't protect her and how he was responsible for her death. She demanded that, along with my basic education, I went to her mansion every weekend to get educated by her. My father, shocked by her actions, worn out by sleepless nights of mourning and crying, probably didn't have the strength to oppose her and maybe even though that sometime with my grandmother could help me with grief; so he simply accepted it.
Since then, every single weekend, for the last ten years, I've been going to my grandmother's mansion in the countryside and listened to her teachings.
This weekend was no exception.