Chapter 63 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 63: Harvest and Hibernation 07
With the arrival of autumn, the days grew cooler one by one.
Each morning, Lucita untied a few bundles of hay to feed the sheep.
The pasture grass on the meadows had all turned yellow by now, and they no longer took the sheep out to graze. The animals were kept in the pen, which needed to be cleaned out every evening.
This flock had nearly fully grown. At this time of year, they were covered in a layer of yellowish-brown wool, dense and curly, soft to the touch.
During the day they liked to cluster together, bleating contentedly, their mouths curved in slight upward arcs, their eyelids drooping, two soft ears poking out from their thick fleece. They looked a little dopey and, having been tamed, didn't flinch at being petted.
In another month it would be time to shear them.
The final crop of peas had been brought in, and Lucita made several earthenware crocks of pea and lamb stew — bought lamb, not the sheep they had worked so hard to raise themselves. She distributed portions to the neighbors and kept two crocks for herself, to eat as a late-night snack.
The peas were still a little tender, simmered slowly with the lamb over low heat until both the beans and the meat had gone completely soft, steeped in a broth shimmering with fat. Never mind the meat and peas, even dry white bread torn up and soaked in the broth was immensely satisfying.
It had become their favorite dish lately.
They had been doing well enough financially to keep more than a hundred pounds of harvested peas rather than selling the lot. A full twenty pounds had been put aside for their own use, stored in the space to be drawn on as needed.
The pea trellises stood empty. The next morning they were coated in a layer of white frost, the vines sagging from the frames.
They spent a whole morning clearing the pea vines. Old pea vines weren't fit for human consumption, so everything was gathered and given to the sheep in the backyard as an unusually fresh treat. It made for a change in their diet, at least.
Then the frames were taken down, folded away in the storage house, and all that remained was bare earth.
The front yard of the farm didn't look very large, but through continued expansion the backyard had grown quite spacious. The cultivated area had more than doubled, and turning it all over was no small task.
After two days of loosening the soil, there was a whole new expanse of ready ground.
With the experience of previous seasons behind her, Lucita planted winter wheat in the backyard this time with confident assurance, the staple grain most households focused on growing.
In the front yard, she expanded her herb bed, so that the entire half of the land by the well, apart from the footprint of the small shop, was now given over to medicinal herbs.
On the other side of the front yard, she planted one bed of turnips and another of spinach, among the few seasonal vegetables autumn offered.
The entire month of August, Lucita spent in a cycle of harvesting grain, selling grain, and planting grain.
Right at August's end, Lucita began figuring out how to build a proper winter shelter for the sheep.
The current pen in the backyard was open to the sky. That was manageable when the weather was only mildly cool, but it would be untenable in winter. A covered shelter was essential to keep the sheep from falling ill.
A sheep shelter, however, was a different matter from a house for people. It only needed to be sturdy, with no particular demands on appearance or craftsmanship. So Lucita didn't trouble Durani. Instead, she bought a cartload of grey bricks from Grandma Gina's kiln and worked it out herself with Violet.
It had to be said, Violet turned out to be more reliable at laying bricks than Lucita, probably because she had spent the entire summer observing Durani's clanging and hammering.
They borrowed a few simple tools from Durani and used several bags of lime and mud slurry as mortar, and before long had laid up a row of brick walls that looked more or less like they knew what they were doing.
Because the mortar was simple, Lucita stacked the bricks in a double layer for extra strength.
The shelter was a little low-ceilinged. A roof of timber, clay, straw, and tiles, a wooden door, and it was done.
The tiles were leftovers from the summer house construction, the wooden door was the old living room door from before the renovations, and both had been dragged out of the storage house and put to use.
Pretty red tiles, neat grey bricks. The shelter stood facing the storage house across the small pond, occupying nearly half the back yard.
Lucita herded the sheep into their fine new home, dismantled the old pen, and moved the dry fence timber to the kitchen as firewood.
By the time the sheep shelter business was finished, August had come and gone.
September arrived, and the sheep reached full maturity. Their wool had grown thicker still, and the time had come to shear them.
It was everyone's first time shearing. All three of them were clumsy and uncertain, and the two adults, Lucita and Violet, did not do a notably better job than Linnea the child. The sheep ended up with uneven patches of bare skin all over them, looking rather pitiable.
As for Delphine — she also had a go, managing two cuts herself, manipulating the shears with spatial energy.
Crooked as her work was, Lucita was genuinely astonished by her spatial control, and afterward spent a good deal of time trying to imitate and practice it. But that is a story for later.
The wool yielded wasn't very much, there being only five sheep.
They gathered it all up and brought it to Elsia's tailor shop. After it was weighed, they specified a style: a raspberry-red hooded short cape.
This was for Linnea. When there was only enough for one, the child should always come first.
The harvest season was drawing to a close. Late September and October were the time for stocking up on provisions and putting on autumn fat in preparation for winter.
People's harvests were piled high in their yards, grain and cereals mounded in small peaks, fruit and root vegetables arranged on ceramic dishes on the tables. Hunters, when not out hunting, began carting loads of firewood home.
The harvest festival would be held in October, and in the lead-up to it, people made all kinds of food to reward themselves for a year's hard work and to prepare for the celebrations.
Lucita reached into the large wicker basket on the covered walkway and scooped up a handful of black tea leaves, letting it fall back through her fingers. The baskets had just recently been used to dry fruit, and now were pressed into service for drying tea.
"Just about dry."
The dried tea leaves were packed into pouches to be brewed, and from them she could bake a seasonal treat: black tea biscuits.
Crushed tea leaves stirred into the biscuit batter, then baked, the finished shortbread was dotted with caramel-brown tea fragments. Baked with tea-infused liquid, the biscuits had a clean, fresh quality that cut through the richness of butter, leaving a pleasantly refreshing aftertaste.
Crunch, crunch. Linnea took her little packet of biscuits out to play, and by the time she came home in the afternoon the bag was invariably empty.
Black tea biscuits had lately become the most popular biscuit in town. People were making them everywhere, and even Teresa from the bakery came to ask for the recipe.
Lucita was happy to share it. It really wasn't complicated. Just tea juice and crushed tea leaves stirred into biscuit batter. That was all.
After that,black tea biscuits became a regular product on Teresa's shelves, and officially entered the fabric of daily life.
The little biscuits Lucita had baked on a whim had, once they became popular, no longer needed her to bake them at all. Fresh ones were available from Teresa's every day. They became Linnea's current favorite guiltless snack, and everyone was perfectly happy with the arrangement.
Lucita packed away the dried tea and continued her winter provisions plan.
Besides this somewhat luxurious tea, what autumn mostly called for was small dried fish.
The season had wind, had sun, and had large quantities of fish not yet driven into dormancy by the cold, and it was the fattest time of year for them.
The specialized drying baskets came out once more. Lucita had even begun to feel these might be the most practical thing she had ever bought from Irene's general store.
The small fish, each about the size of a palm, were laid out to fill the baskets. They had all been cleaned beforehand: scaled, gutted, soaked in brine for a time, drained, coated on both sides with coarse salt, and were now ready to be spread in the baskets to dry.
Setting the baskets in the covered walkway meant she didn't even need to worry about overly direct sunlight, saving her the trouble of a cover for the drying fish.
Every three days, Lucita dried one full basket of small fish. She kept this up for two solid weeks. The finished fish were strung together and hung in the kitchen, a heavy, satisfying abundance.
Spring bamboo shoots, summer dried berries, autumn black tea and dried fish, four seasons of salty, sweet, and savory preserved foods, packed in bags, strung up on walls, all set aside to be savored slowly through the winter ahead.
The squirrels had stored enough pine nuts and chestnuts to wait out the deep cold in their tree hollows.
By the end of September, the autumn harvest and winter provisioning were more or less complete. The forest had turned entirely to orange-red and gold, the colors spreading out in rings, the mountains seeming almost veiled in a warm, dense mist.
In the golden autumn forest, the soapberry trees had begun to hang heavy with fruit, clusters of small green soapberries, plump and dense, with a satisfying weight in the hand.
This fruit was very popular in Irttat, being a natural cleanser. Take one in your hands and rub it, and it would foam.
Using soapberry pods in spring and soapberries in autumn had become the town's established annual cleaning routine.
Though industrial soap had been gradually making its way into Irttat over recent years, people had more than enough soapberry pods and soapberries, and had nothing like the urgency for industrial soap that the people of the outside world felt.
Every year when the soapberries came in thick clusters, people seized the opportunity and used nature's gift for a thorough clean, part of the preparation for winter's arrival.
Lucita's household was no different. Together with the other townspeople they scrubbed the house from top to bottom, inside and out, including the grease on the kitchen walls and the dust lodged in the window joints.
For the next several days, the whole house carried the fresh, clean scent of soapberry.
In that fragrance, October came, and the festival drew near.
Ripe chestnuts fell on the ground of the forest, some gathered by squirrels and tucked away in tree hollows, some picked up by passing hunters and children to take home, and many more left on the ground, more than the squirrels could carry away and more than the children alone could collect.
Chestnuts were a wonderfully fragrant and sweet fruit. Everyone had learned that much already. At this time, with the year's grain stores sorted, and the year-long bustle finally easing into a quieter pace, people went into the mountains together in groups to gather chestnuts.
Lucita told Linnea with great mystery: "I'm going to make something particularly delicious with chestnuts. I guarantee you'll impress your classmates at the autumn festival."
Linnea promptly and excitedly arranged to go out with her friend Jessica, setting off in high spirits to gather chestnuts. "I guarantee I'll gather more than you!"
Violet watched Linnea's enthusiastic departure: "That child — she's still so gullible. Believe absolutely everything she's told."
Lucita pressed her knuckles to her chin and gave a small cough: "That's coaxing, not deceiving. There's a difference."
Before the words were even out, Delphine, lagging a step behind, swooped after Linnea and announced loudly, "I heard everything! They're just stringing you along!"
Her clear voice echoed across the street and faded into the distance. One ran, one gave chase, and they vanished around the corner.
Lucita tucked back a strand of hair and smiled to herself.
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