One Flower in a Meadow
Persephone was the daughter of Demeter, the goddess of grain and the harvest. So the grass grew thick wherever the daughter walked.
That day Persephone was in a meadow with her friends, picking armfuls of lilies and violets and irises. Their laughing carried to the far end of the field.
Then a single narcissus a little way off caught her eye, unusually large and fine. Persephone moved away from her friends and walked toward it.
That flower had not come up by itself, but had been made to bloom there beforehand. It was a flower meant to leave the daughter alone for a moment.
The Ground Splits
It was the moment Persephone reached out to the flower, and a low sound rang under her feet. The ground split open.
Four black horses came up out of the gap, and Hades, king of the underworld, stood on the chariot. He lifted Persephone onto it.
Persephone called for her mother, and her voice struck the mountains and reached as far as the sea. But the ground closed again, and only the half-picked flowers lay scattered in the meadow.
Nine Nights of Torches
Demeter heard that sound, and her chest went cold as she ran calling her daughter’s name. There was nobody in the meadow.
Demeter lit two torches and then walked for nine days and nights. She neither ate nor washed, and she searched to the ends of the world.
On the tenth day Helios stopped her. Helios was the god who drives the sun across the sky, and his is the seat that looks down on anything that happens on the earth.
Helios said, “Your daughter is in the underworld. Hades took her, and Zeus gave his permission in advance.”
The World Stops Growing
Demeter had no heart to sit among the gods, and she did not go back to Olympus. She came down among people and sat there a long while.
And then nothing grew out of the ground. The seeds stayed in the soil as they were, and the fields were empty however they were ploughed.
Storehouses ran out and people went hungry, and even the grain offered to the gods stopped coming. On Olympus they could not go on pretending not to know.
Zeus sent one god after another to soothe Demeter. Demeter said the same thing every time. “Until I see my daughter, no grain grows.”
A Few Pomegranate Seeds
Zeus sent Hermes down to the underworld with word to bring Persephone back. Hades did not go against it.
But it was just as Persephone was climbing onto the chariot that Hades broke open a pomegranate and held out a few seeds. Persephone put them in her mouth.
One mouthful of food from the underworld ties a person to that place, so Persephone could not leave it completely. The year was cut into three, and one of those parts she would spend below.
Mother and daughter met again, and when Demeter held her daughter, shoots came up in the fields again. But one season each year, the daughter goes back down under the ground.
Today, the Things That Come Back
While Persephone is under the ground the fields lie empty, and when she comes up, shoots push the soil aside. That is how the people of old explained the seasons.
This story holds a getting back and a losing at once. Demeter got her daughter back but not wholly, and every year she sends her off and every year she takes her in again.
There are things in our own lives like that, and in front of what cannot be undone, people hold on to the part that comes back. That spring follows winter is a promise of the same kind.