Baka's Wish
(page 1)
Mara sat at her spinning wheel and spun this day as she did every other day. She'd spun every hour of every day since she was born, it seemed. Her Baka had always spun too, and so did her Mama. Mara didn't really know any other way of life.
From the time the birds started singing... when there was just enough light of day for them to fly... enough to come out from their hiding places, that's when she began her spinning. When the bats finally went home to sleep and the the roosters began crowing, that was the sign for Mara to start spinning.
Grandma, whom they referred to as Baka, often would say, and she'd wag her finger as she did, "Dear heart, money doesn't grow on trees you know. This is what we do. This is how we live. If we don't spin there will be no food."
Mara didn't really understand all that. Baka had first spoken those words when Mara was just a small child, and too young to understand. Back then, she believed Baka with childish innocence and assumed that Baka only told her things that were absolutely true. Therefore, she believed that if she didn't do her work they all would actually perish. She certainly didn't want to be responsible for unwittingly murdering her family, she thought, just because she was lazy. It was already difficult enough being a child without having manslaughter on your conscience.
Nonetheless, she knew that Baka would never lie about something so grave as this. Baka only told you things that she herself believed and that were irrefutable.
It was an odd thought though. Everyone knew that money didn't grow on trees, but food did, if you didn't mind eating nothing but fruit. But what if you had money but you couldn't find any food to buy? It's a good thing they had a garden, Mara thought.
It seemed that she'd been alive forever, Baka, that is. She'd probably just go on living forever unless maybe God intervened and told her to take a rest and give somebody else a chance. No one could figure it out - how she lived so long. Maybe it was because of all the spinning. She did look more and more like a withered prune as the years added up though, so Mara thought that maybe living forever wasn't something a person would really want to aspire to. But when you think about it, to a child everybody seems to have been alive forever. As far as they're concerned, when you only have 3 or 4 total years of life to reflect on, everything and everyone is old.
The future, on the other hand, was something quite vast and far away. Mara's future only projected as far as her next birthday, or maybe Christmas. The future might as well have been infinity for her, something in a book. Old age was unimaginable.
Baka was full of esoteric facts, gathered over decades of life experience. Most of the facts came from the Bible. Practically everybody else in the village got their facts from the Bible too, for that matter. They just assumed that everything in the Bible was true, regardless of what science had to say. They could pretty much bet on all of it as far as they were concerned, from the great flood to the second coming of Jesus.
But being a little more grown-up now, some of Baka's utterances these days sounded downright idiotic to Mara. For instance, one day it was thundering outside and the sky had become almost black from the thick clouds. Lightning flashed off in the hills, a sure sign that rain would be spraying into the house any minute, soaking everything. Mara stretched her body out the window to close the shutters. Baka looked up for a moment from her work and said to her, "Hear that? Saint Peter's rolling his wagon down the cobblestone street in heaven."
Using a fairy tale to explain away something scary was one of Baka's self-perceived skills. Superstition was good that way. It could shut up a scared kid... during a thunder storm for instance, at least for a while. It wasn't a great cognitive leap for a 3 year old... this business about Saint Peter. The use of superstition, unfortunately, did occasionally backfire, creating fodder for childhood nightmares while initially trying to help avoid them.
Things got a bit complicated, though, when the topic strayed too far beyond Easter Bunnies and things like that. Ghosts were a problem, for example. They were hard to explain away, even for grownups. The general consensus was that they did exist, but the deeper question was, "Where and how do they exist?" After all, ghosts and the like had to coexist in the world of God, Jesus and the Bible. It was just a hop, skip and a jump from righteousness to eternal damnation if one entertained too much of of this kind of silliness, so you had to be careful. There was a "hereafter" to look forward to. But, by comparison, this was all amoeba-like in its cosmic simplicity compared to something like, say, the Immaculate Conception where, in the process of rationalizing, you could cultivate a truly sleepless night.
A creature of habit and conditioning, nonetheless, Mara always got up at the first peep of daylight to start her spinning. She spun all day long pretty much until dinner. It wasn't as mind numbing as one would imagine, really. But there were certainly things that were more fun to do. And there wasn't much point in being philosophical, wondering what life could be otherwise. Mara just knew that it was essential that she spin. That was how they lived after all, and they couldn't live if they didn't spin. So Baka had told her anyway. Baka, on the other hand, was quite philosophical on the topic of her spinning. If you asked her what she though about it, she'd tell you that she found it interesting and stimulating. Spiritually enlightening. She felt that this was her way of honoring God and the path He had chosen for her.
The spinning they did was for others more than than it was for themselves. They spun and sold their yarn to people in other towns and cities. That was how they bought things like kerosene for the lamps and cotton cloth, which they used to sew their own dresses. It was cheaper than buying them. Sewing your own dresses was also a display of skill and willingness to do what needed to be done. There was a kind of honor in the self sufficiency. It was foolish to be wasteful and worse to be a squanderer since you had so little of anything to begin with. All you had was what God chose to give you, and it would be extremely arrogant to waste it.
They were alone now since her father died. That's where Mama was today; off selling yarn to the city people. It used to be Father's job but fate, accompanied by necessity changed all that.
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