Alpaca and Apparitions by Andi R. Christopher

Author:Andi R. Christopher [Andi R. Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

Laurel and Marigold visibly relaxed over the next day. Mildred could tell they had both been working too hard, so let them have quiet time, keeping them supplied with bread and jam and cheese. Before the morning sun hit, she and Laurel had planted the seedlings in the garden, cousins kneeling together on a folded rug, hands dirty.

“This is going to be a useful garden, I reckon,” Laurel had said. “Still things to add to it, but you can do a lot with the basics.”

Mildred had nodded. “It’s been weird not having a garden. Potions with supermarket herbs in little flats above deserted art galleries – they’re better than nothing, but it’s hard to make them work without really getting the whole sense of them right. Thank you for bringing me these. I’ll get the cuttings in later, once they’re ready.”

“Oh, no problem,” Laurel had replied, standing and dusting off her summer dress. “Half of them came from Marigold’s grandmother’s garden anyway. Lots of the family helped me get mine together – even if it is still in pots, so it’s nice to be able to pass that along.

Mildred had edged the herb garden with stones she found around the property, in place of the remnants of the old brick border. There was something fundamental about having a herb garden, something that said home.

Most of the time they were content to just hang out on the farm, stretching out in the warm of early spring. Mildred supposed that with everything going on in the city, some genuine quiet was what they needed – and spring was far more hospitable here than Wellington’s wind and rain. She swapped family stories and caught up on gossip with Laurel, and Marigold showed a genuine interest in weaving, in how the loom fitted together, how it could be set up for different types of patterns. She extrapolated from what Mildred told her quickly, understanding how you could change a pattern not just with the obvious choice of warp or weft colours, but with the choice of header and how it was threaded. She wondered aloud if Marigold had any crafting ability herself.

“I think my grandmother tried to teach me to sew once,” Marigold replied. “I wasn’t very good at it. But all that... it was like coding, I liked it, and the spinning seems peaceful.”

Thinking on that statement, Mildred gave Marigold some wool to card, two wooden paddles to separate out the fibres until it was ready for spinning. What Marigold had said was right, and yet something Mildred had forgotten – it was peaceful, meditative even.

It was exciting, of course, to have her work admired as art, to be told she was on the cutting edge, to have her work recognised as doing things no-one had previously thought to, as bringing out old techniques and using them in original ways. But sometimes, sometimes her craft was just this, the meditative repetitiveness of hand carding, two paddles against each other, or holding the gentle tension when using a spinning wheel.

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