What the hells? Was I broken?
“No, honey and lemons is the name of the”—say something, anything—“of the day! Yes, I’mnamingthe days here! Because I name things. It’s like—uh—writing a chapter. I always name the chapter first, then I write the chapter. So here, in Dwindle, I’m going to name the day, and then we will do that day.”
I blinked.
Hesper also blinked.
“Okay,” she said slowly.
I audibly gulped.
“So that list of nearly one hundred tasks is just for today?” Hesper crossed her arms, an incredulous look on her face.
“Yes, of course,” I said, because, out of all the things that had just happened, a too long to-do list was the least worrisome. Or surprising. Twenty-nine days and counting were all we had.
“All right then, put me where you want me.”
Oh, I will, my heart sighed.
Will you stop it?I begged.
Never, it replied. Happily.
Repairing a thatched roof. In one day.
That should be easy, right?
A host of things were growing on the roof. Well,growingwas a stretch. They once had grown there, then they’d died up there, and now they matted themselves into the long straw. But clearing them away had to be done unless Hesperand I wanted to run the risk of pesky leaks and unwelcome creatures finding their way through the cracks and into the cottage. Obviously,Icouldn’t do the repair. I had an overrun garden to tend.
Hesper surveyed the cottage, her arms crossed, her mouth pursed.
“I’m going to need a ladder,” she finally said.
“I can go into town and ask Angus. I’m sure someone has one,” I offered.
“No need. I can build one myself.”
“You can?”
“Yes, I enjoy building things.”
“Oh, well, good on you then,” I replied.
This was more temptation than I could bear. People who can build things had always been a weakness for me.
We set to our respective tasks for the day. I donned the old hat and apron that hung outside the cottage while Hesper found an axe in a discarded pile of mostly broken tools behind the cottage. She sat down on a tree stump as she sharpened the blade—grunting with each strike of the whetstone. Right next to me.
Excellent. I loved her grunts first things in the morning; it was almost as peaceful as the lute music from Moss. Not at all distracting!
Meanwhile, I got to work on the garden beds.
They were in terrible disarray. The wood was splintering, roots had broken through wherever they could. The soil was lifeless and needed extensive loosening. Luckily, Angus and Murt had dropped off a menacingly large kitchen fork, which would have to do. A broad fork would have been the best forthe job, but that would have been impossible to come by anytime soon. So I hunched over and began.
The first garden bed took me three full hours to completely turn over. There were hundreds of rocks and a seemingly endless number of gnarled roots that, while very much dead, certainly gripped the earth below for dear life. I wrenched, pulled, and even began to sing to the roots like I used to back in Moss. Soon enough, they released their hold.
My shoulder muscles ached and sweat dripped down every part of me. But the work felt good, familiar.
I set onto the second and third, each with their own collection of issues. The second bed had been home to corn, which notoriously has the bad habit of decomposing slowly before leaving behind much residue. The third had deep-rooted legumes, which wasn’t inherently a bad thing. They were often good crops for soil health. But everything was too dead for me to keep much of anything.
