A quote: “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” ~~ Robert Louis Stevenson
I’ll start with a story …
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We fled the cities with little more than what we wore. Some of us died within days, others walking dead in the journey. We are a tiny group among tiny groups, relearning things we should have never forgotten.
But we do remember, one day a year, where old habits drive new ones. Gathering, offerings on the table to share – roasted wild turkey and rabbit, picked greens, bread, dried fruit … The plates are roughhewn, the flatware salvaged finds.
Look as Miriam gently unwraps a Before. Her great-great-grandmother’s sterling candlestick holders. New candles lit and, in this wilderness, we are thankful.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license
Sheila Garrett says: The woman on the horse stared at him intently. He worried she might set her pack of dogs on him, but he got by. Then she turned to follow him.
“Where’re you going?”
“Don’t know.”
“Where you from?”
“None of your business.”
He turned onto a side road but she, and the dogs, still followed.
“Do you even know where you are?”
“If you don’t leave me alone right now I’m calling the police.”
“Go ahead, I can wait.”
He did, they came. The work was hard, the pay not much more than room and board, but he had a good trade now, training the horses and dogs, and as he waited for the others to say what they were grateful for, he knew exactly what he would say.
Six hundred light-years spinward from Earth. To the mind the distance is a number, so far beyond human experience as to be impossible to grasp. Even when someone set up a telescope and pointed it to show Sol’s faint glimmer, and told us that the light we were seeing started their journey when Vlad II, the historical Dracula, was still ruling Wallachia, and in the Americas the Aztec Empire was flourishing, it was still a struggle to grasp the vastness of interstellar space. Not surprising when we’d leaped that distance in the time it once took a steamship to cross the Atlantic, thanks to the Kitties’ interstellar drive.
But here we are, on this world of an orange sun that’s just a number in one or another star chart. It’ll get a name in time, as settlement progresses. And I suppose we ought to be grateful that our settlements have access to technology that will make the coming winter far easier than the Pilgrims’ first winter. Then again, the Kitties want strong colonies that will hold the line against their ancient enemies, not mass graves of malcontents and undesirables. But I still miss old Earth, where the light and the air and the water are right.
Still, we can be grateful that the environment is sufficiently biocompatible that we can grow our crops in the soil, rather than having to build greenhouses for everything. We’re still learning, and we lost quite a few plantings on the way, but we have enough to pull us through the coming winter and still be able to hold a proper harvest festival. Not exactly an American Thanksgiving and not the Kitties’ equivalent, but something that all of us can enjoy together, another step in putting the blunders of First Contact behind us.
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