Historical Setting, 629 C.E. Serf’s farms at Metz
Will and I walk back to his hut even through the last of the rain. The tragedy he feared isn’t that the oats bend over. Here, the deluge has poured through the roof of the little house of reeds, and washed away the mudbrick sides and Layla and Ana are huddled with the baby inside under a tarp of deer hide. Everything in the little house is soaking in wet mud; it’s the same mud bricks that were intended to seal the house from pouring rain.
The first priority is keeping the baby warm, but Will doesn’t organize things according to priorities. He shouts a blaming prayer into the heavens, and like a great cyclone in human form, he tears what is left of a roof from the house.
“Wait!” I stop him. “More storms are coming. If we just double over the roof you already have, it will be smaller but more weather tight, just for now.”
I can see his frustration rising and any suggestion I can make becomes the opposite of what we do.
Meanwhile Ana and Layla are cleaning the mud from the places that aren’t covered with the hide. They’ve set up the hide as a hunter’s tent within the walls of the mud brick house.
Now Will is laying the blame for the chaos on the women saying they made that little shelter with the hide too small, when the whole thing needs a roof.
I see it is best for Will to be useful, so before anymore blaming is spewed I suggest he and I go gather more reeds for future thatch before the rising creek tears up the reeds still available in the creek. Already it’s a challenge to wade in the roiling current, but once we get to them, the reeds are easy to gather. We return in the drizzle with lots of wet and heavy bundles tied on our backs and we spread them out to dry by the supports for the mud brick walls. It’s one of those days. We can’t start the thatching until the reeds are dryer so Will just listens to my lessons on thatching – a hypothetical project – not something he would really do. But it is something that all my sons hear from me, for ever and ever I never stop insisting my sons learn to thatch. It is what it is.
Ana commends Will on his “good listening” in spite of the emergency.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 