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sonreirHome
Mum forbade my sisters and I from going out on Midsummer Eve.
"You'll be taken," she warned us, "and no one will ever see you alive again."
We laughed at these warnings, for weren't they silly? They were old wives' tales, superstitions that held no sway over us now.
"You'll be taken," Mum said, even as we laughed, "by men who are too beautiful to be mortal."
My sisters laughed, but they heeded her warning, and didn't go out without carrying iron in their pockets, on their days -- nails scavenged from the barn, silently pressed into their hands by Dad, who didn't believe anymore than we did, but who was wise enough not to cross Mum.
I tried to listen. Dad gave me iron same as the rest, and it made no difference. I'd put it in an apron pocket and lose it, faster than you could say Jack Robinson.
"I suppose I'm fated to be taken," I teased Mum, after I'd lost it yet again.
"That's not funny," she told me, her voice tight. "You'll give them ideas."
I shrugged, and accepted the new bit of iron I was given, put it in my pocket dutifully, and prepared to lose it, same as the rest.
When I met one of them, I didn't realize who he was. Mum had always said that they were more beautiful than human men, unnaturally so, but he could have been one of my brothers -- ruddy cheeked with rough hands and muddy brown eyes. He had a gap between his front teeth, and it showed when he laughed.
He was a shepherd, he said, and he'd lost part of his flock. Had I seen any sheep, as I'd been watching our geese?
"No," I told him. "But I'll keep a look out."
He smiled and said -- not that he was grateful, but that I had done him a boon, and I would know his sheep by the bells tied 'round their necks.
I found them, later, or they found me. They were odd -- quieter than ours, silently standing and watching me. I didn't think anything of it. I kept an eye on them, and when he came again, I told him: "They're grazing on the other side of the hill."
He swept a low bow and doffed the hat he wore. "Lady," he said, all mock seriousness. "Truly, I owe you my gratitude."
He didn't say thank you, and when he spoke of gratitude, it seemed more the abstract concept than anything real, but I laughed and told him to stand up and put his hat back on, that I was no lady, that no one tending geese would be.
"As you wish," he said.
He gathered his sheep, and winked at me as he left.
"I'll come back," he said. "If you tend the geese here often?"
"Yes," I told him.
I thought he was from the village, truly -- or at most, the next one over. He could have been any village boy. His sheep could have wandered from anywhere.
I didn't think of my mother's warning, the bits of iron my father made us carry.
His smile felt all too human.
When he asked me to a dance, three days later, I was all too quick to say yes.
I went with him to a mill in the neighboring village, wearing the dress that my mother had helped me sew. I danced with him, and others like him -- all just like the other village boys I knew. I didn't recognize anyone, but they felt all too human, and anyway, what was there to recognize?
I didn't stay as long as they wanted. It hit midnight and I knew I had to go, so off I went.
I left the dance and walked, in the pitch dark, to where I thought home was.
Tam was the one that found me. He had named it his sworn duty, to pick up the ones he called "revelers".
"I knew you were one of them," he said, later, "because you were wearing a dress that looked like something out of a godawful BBC drama."
Tam frightened me, when I met him.
I hadn't been able to find my way home -- blaming the dark, and not the fact that I recognized nothing. Instead, I curled up under a hedge -- I'll find my way home in the morning -- and tried to sleep.
Tam came along with a flashlight, blinding me, and that was our meeting.
He said it was the dress that tipped him off, but I found out, later, that he went walking that road every night in summer, looking for those, like him, that had been displaced.
I didn't believe him at first. When he told me everything, patiently, first asking how it was that I had come to be under the hedge, and just where I had been before, then connecting the dots and summarizing what it was that had befallen me -- you went under the hill, didn't your mother ever warn you -- and what there was that could be done about it. Nothing, mostly.
My family, Tam explained, after he had told me who he was and where I was, were long gone. Dead, he said, for probably hundreds of years. If I was lucky, my brothers would have married and had children, and those children would have had children, and so on and so forth until it came to be that I had family alive -- distant, but still around. It was unlikely, though.
He helped me place where I'd come from in time, what year it might have been and where I was in the official record, and to get the documents I needed to mark myself.
"This was one of their sites," he said. "A Faery site. We're still finding people, now and then."
Tam himself had been displaced. "I'm from a little later than you," he said. "And I stayed a little longer. Still, though..."
Few people had ever stayed as short a time as I had and yet been flung so far. The mill, or the remains of it, were completely gone. Cottages had been built in its place, summer rentals.
"It's not literally a hill," said Anita, trying to be nice. She was Tam's girlfriend, and had only lost fifty or so years. Her sister was still alive -- in her 70s, but still around -- and had taken her in, helped get her the paperwork. I envied her, in a way. At least her family got to know. "Sometimes it's a castle, or an old lord's holding, or..."
"A mill," said Tam. "Because they like to play near running water, like kids playing chicken."
"They can cross water," I said, remembering the stream I'd had to step over to get there. "I think."
Tam shrugged. "Must have been part of the later legend, then, after the magic started to die."
There weren't many of us. Tam said that he found, at most, perhaps two a year. I was the first for my year.
"There'll be another," he said. I got my hopes up, thinking it might be someone I knew, one of my sisters or someone else.
"Don't," he said. "It never..."
His experience had been literal, walking through a door in the side of a hill and into what he recognized as their kingdom. He hadn't gone alone, either. One of his childhood friends had gone in with him, intent on seeing him home safely. According to the record, he did -- and Tam didn't.
"I refused their food and wine," he said. "I carried iron in my pockets. I did all that you were supposed to do, and now..."
Anita always put an arm around him when he got like this, her gray eyes sad. "I did everything you were supposed to do, too," she always said. "And here I am."
The second arrival, when we found him that summer, was only a little more displaced than Anita, no one any of us knew.
"You see," Tam said.
I thought I could go back.
Tam had lots of stories, tales of people who overcame great hardships and made it home in the end.
I believed them, at least at first. Books were the one safe thing. I'd been taught to read with the family's Bible, and if the paper was different, if the type looked strange, if the language sounded funny, at least it wasn't so far removed from everything I knew. I loved what Anita called period stories, things set around the time I'd disappeared. I started with those, crowing about what the authors had got right or what they'd got wrong. I slowly moved my way forward, reading them, until I was more comfortable with the modern world.
I didn't read anything with magic in it. Anita said this was wise. The stories I read were all too plausible. None of them were about going backward or forward in time, but they were familiar — overcoming hardships of one kind or another. The heroine escaped from kidnappers and made her way back, or else managed to make it home after being married off against her will. There were challenges in these that felt insurmountable, but she always made it home.
I thought that could be me, too. I went wandering out on Midsummer's Eve, looking for a way under the hill.
The closest I came was a group of revelers in the woods, dancing to music that didn't sound like music. I joined them, and Tam had to come and pull me out — not because they were supernatural, but because I had misunderstood what they were and what they were doing.
"She wandered into a rave," he told Anita later, exasperated. "And would have stayed there all night, if I hadn't..."
She laughed. "Well, it's probably the closest thing to...well..."
Tam scowled and didn't say a word.
Anita explained to me, later, that magic was dead. "They're gone, babe. No idea where they went." She used slang when she was trying to be especially gentle with me, the new words softening the message. "No one's seen anyone from Faery in probably forty years. Even in my day..."
Even when she was a girl, they were rare. There was an attempt, a revival, something about magic and mysticism, strange writings about opening your third eye, but it was of a different sort. There was nothing about iron and salt and St. John's-wort, rowan and running water and wearing your clothes turned inside-out. Their magic was beneficial, safe.
"I don't understand," I said. "If they're gone, then how did I...?"
"Near as Tam can tell, they're still around," Anita said easily. "But they don't interact with us anymore. We're too skeptical, and all the real magic is gone from our world."
She sighed. "There's no way back, hon," she said, after a moment. "You can only go forward, yeah?"
"Yeah," I said.
I adjusted, slowly.
Tam helped me get my papers in order, and Anita taught me how to do basic things -- how to cook on a gas stove, how to use the laundry machines, everything that had changed. They let me live with them for six months, until I had the hang of it, more or less. I was nervous and didn't want to drive anywhere, refused to get in a car unless there was a pressing need, but I'd managed to learn what I needed to get through the day.
Tam arranged something -- I was never quite sure how -- to get me lodging, a little studio to live in and some money to live off of.
"This will be good for two years," he said. "Until you figure out what it is you want to do."
He and Anita helped me move the few things I could call mine, and went with me to the charity shop to find everything else I needed -- dishes and pots and pans and bedding.
"You'll be fine," Anita said, after we'd lugged everything up. "If you need anything, you've got a phone, yeah?"
I held up the little square of plastic with its comically large buttons. "Yeah."
"It's okay if you get nervous, the first night you're alone," she said rapidly. "It's -- different. Give us a ring if you need anything."
"Yeah," I said.
I adjusted.
Tam held meetings once a week, in one of the cafes off the town square. We met and talked about basic things like finding and keeping a job and how to learn to use a computer if you've never seen one before and yes, the world is very different, but some things are still the same: have you seen the fruit.
I went, at least at first, because I needed the connection, the community.
We talked a lot about what was different. There was a lot of complaining, different people who had been back for longer commenting that it was strange to have been vaulted so far into the future.
"Be glad the language hasn't changed much," said Tam. "There's some poor fool out there I rescued a few years back that only spoke a dialect of Middle English that hadn't survived. Imagine what life must have been like for him."
We all fell silent at that.
"What happened to him?" I asked Tam, as he gave me a ride home. He and Anita lived just up the road; it was where they stashed the new arrivals, as they called us, before we gained independence and didn't need such frequent checking-in.
"Hmm?"
"Your Middle English man."
"Oh," said Tam. He raised an eyebrow. "If I told you it was me, would you believe me?"
"Nah."
He grinned, a rarity. "Good on you. I made him up! Certainly gets people to be grateful for what they have though, yeah?"
"Yes," I said, and sighed.
I lasted a year and a day without a breakdown -- what the Faery rules said everything would take -- and then I lost my shit, as Tam put it.
"It's not fair!" I howled at him and Anita, having banged in through their front door without knocking. "I've been here long enough, I've done everything I was supposed to, and I'm still here!"
Anita tried to comfort me -- "It's not the end of the world, it's the beginning of spring and all the crocuses are out" -- but Tam didn't bother.
"Get over it," he said. "You're stuck here now. The modern world is shitty, yeah? It's not what you thought it would be? You're fuckin' miserable most of the time and know that everyone you loved isn't even bones in the churchyard anymore, they're dust, gone and dead and forgotten by everyone but you, because no one else ever knew 'em? Fuck off."
I stared at him, shocked.
"Tam," Anita started.
"Don't," he said, his voice bitter. "I know what you're going to say. Don't."
He glared at me. "It gets better," he said. "But you have to let it. This is home now. You can't go back, so you've got to make the best of it. All right?"
I swallowed hard. "All right."
I let go of the idea that I'd find a way back, that I'd go to bed one night and wake up in my own time to find it was all a dream.
I got a job working in a bakery. Once they taught me how to work the electric oven, that was all it really took. They loved the recipes I had for various things, even if they didn't taste right. The flour was different; there was too much sugar, they didn't use enough eggs, and the milk tasted funny.
"Chin up," said Anita, when I brought her and Tam loaves of bread in the evenings, complained about how displaced I still felt. "It gets better."
Tam eyed me warily. "It does," he agreed.
We'd never really talked, after the conversation on my anniversary. We didn't know what to say to each other.
After landing the bakery job, I started experimenting with baking at home.
Anita said that scent and taste had the strongest ties to memory, she'd read a study about it somewhere, and it was true that there was something about working in the bakery, the warmth and scent of bread dough, that reminded me of home -- of Mum on baking day, shaping all the loaves with help from me and my sisters. In times of plenty, we'd eat them with butter, and sometimes (if Dad had managed to bargain for it) with honey.
The first time I ate a piece of bread covered in butter, I cried -- not because it was the recipe I remembered, but because it was wrong. Close, but not quite. I wanted it to be real, and it wasn't.
I kept at it, in the kitchen, tirelessly working to make the loaf I remembered.
Anita made fun, but gently -- "love your job that much, babe?"
Tam didn't say anything.
I gave them all my castoffs, took new loaves to each of the meetings. I became known as the bread girl, the one who was excellent at baking, but constantly dissatisfied with her results.
"I'll know it when I get it," I told Anita, after she told me (for the twentieth time) that perhaps I ought to try making something else. "I need to get this. It's...important."
On my next anniversary, Tam brought me a peace-offering, a bag of flour.
"There's a man at the university who makes it," he said. "Trying to recreate old medieval recipes; I said that you were trying to do the same with bread, and he offered me this."
I took it for what it was and thanked him. We still hadn't quite made up; hadn't talked since the initial fight a year ago. I'd gotten closer to Anita, but there was nothing to say to him.
"Might help this feel more like home," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well."
He disappeared before I could say anything else.
I made a loaf of bread with it, using what technique I remembered from Mum, and baked it in the gas oven.
When it came out, I knew I'd finally gotten it.
I let the loaf cool and then ate it with my hands, standing over the oven, not bothering even with the butter I had bought. I cried as I ate it, remembering Mum and my siblings, Dad. I wondered if they had ever realized what happened to me, if it would have made a difference if they had.
I finished it, and then I baked another, same as the first, and took it to Tam and Anita.
He was waiting at the door, when I walked up. This wasn't unusual; the gate to their yard creaked loudly, and they often met me at the door.
I handed him the loaf, wrapped in a dishcloth.
"Here," I said.
He nodded, took it over to the cutting board and hacked a piece off, still spongy, then spread butter over it.
He took a bite and closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "This is..."
"It's the right stuff," I said. "It's..."
"Home," he said. "You've given me home back."
I sighed, relieved. "Welcome home, Tam Lane."
He nodded at me sharply, just once.
"Welcome home, Jane."
And I knew, finally, that I was.
~*~
I don't usually give context on stuff, but I feel it need to add a little here:
If you're not familiar with the idea of being taken 'under the hill' or why it's important to carry iron, well, there is a Wikipedia page for everything!
Medieval bread was probably quite a bit different from ours, too, and you can read an entertaining post about it here.
I wanted to do something about coming 'home' when home is not actually 'home'. I live far away from where I grew up, and home has not felt like home in over a decade. Standing in my kitchen Sunday night and making a dish that my grandma used to make when I was a child, I felt a sudden connection to where I grew up, that time and place, and found myself crying at the idea that there is no going back, only going forward. From there, the idea of Jane and her plight was born. While she doesn't come home by sea, the larger meaning of 'nostos' is homecoming, specifically arriving home after a long and difficult journey, and the word itself means, in Greek, 'to return home'.
Thank you for reading.
Mum forbade my sisters and I from going out on Midsummer Eve.
"You'll be taken," she warned us, "and no one will ever see you alive again."
We laughed at these warnings, for weren't they silly? They were old wives' tales, superstitions that held no sway over us now.
"You'll be taken," Mum said, even as we laughed, "by men who are too beautiful to be mortal."
My sisters laughed, but they heeded her warning, and didn't go out without carrying iron in their pockets, on their days -- nails scavenged from the barn, silently pressed into their hands by Dad, who didn't believe anymore than we did, but who was wise enough not to cross Mum.
I tried to listen. Dad gave me iron same as the rest, and it made no difference. I'd put it in an apron pocket and lose it, faster than you could say Jack Robinson.
"I suppose I'm fated to be taken," I teased Mum, after I'd lost it yet again.
"That's not funny," she told me, her voice tight. "You'll give them ideas."
I shrugged, and accepted the new bit of iron I was given, put it in my pocket dutifully, and prepared to lose it, same as the rest.
When I met one of them, I didn't realize who he was. Mum had always said that they were more beautiful than human men, unnaturally so, but he could have been one of my brothers -- ruddy cheeked with rough hands and muddy brown eyes. He had a gap between his front teeth, and it showed when he laughed.
He was a shepherd, he said, and he'd lost part of his flock. Had I seen any sheep, as I'd been watching our geese?
"No," I told him. "But I'll keep a look out."
He smiled and said -- not that he was grateful, but that I had done him a boon, and I would know his sheep by the bells tied 'round their necks.
I found them, later, or they found me. They were odd -- quieter than ours, silently standing and watching me. I didn't think anything of it. I kept an eye on them, and when he came again, I told him: "They're grazing on the other side of the hill."
He swept a low bow and doffed the hat he wore. "Lady," he said, all mock seriousness. "Truly, I owe you my gratitude."
He didn't say thank you, and when he spoke of gratitude, it seemed more the abstract concept than anything real, but I laughed and told him to stand up and put his hat back on, that I was no lady, that no one tending geese would be.
"As you wish," he said.
He gathered his sheep, and winked at me as he left.
"I'll come back," he said. "If you tend the geese here often?"
"Yes," I told him.
I thought he was from the village, truly -- or at most, the next one over. He could have been any village boy. His sheep could have wandered from anywhere.
I didn't think of my mother's warning, the bits of iron my father made us carry.
His smile felt all too human.
When he asked me to a dance, three days later, I was all too quick to say yes.
I went with him to a mill in the neighboring village, wearing the dress that my mother had helped me sew. I danced with him, and others like him -- all just like the other village boys I knew. I didn't recognize anyone, but they felt all too human, and anyway, what was there to recognize?
I didn't stay as long as they wanted. It hit midnight and I knew I had to go, so off I went.
I left the dance and walked, in the pitch dark, to where I thought home was.
Tam was the one that found me. He had named it his sworn duty, to pick up the ones he called "revelers".
"I knew you were one of them," he said, later, "because you were wearing a dress that looked like something out of a godawful BBC drama."
Tam frightened me, when I met him.
I hadn't been able to find my way home -- blaming the dark, and not the fact that I recognized nothing. Instead, I curled up under a hedge -- I'll find my way home in the morning -- and tried to sleep.
Tam came along with a flashlight, blinding me, and that was our meeting.
He said it was the dress that tipped him off, but I found out, later, that he went walking that road every night in summer, looking for those, like him, that had been displaced.
I didn't believe him at first. When he told me everything, patiently, first asking how it was that I had come to be under the hedge, and just where I had been before, then connecting the dots and summarizing what it was that had befallen me -- you went under the hill, didn't your mother ever warn you -- and what there was that could be done about it. Nothing, mostly.
My family, Tam explained, after he had told me who he was and where I was, were long gone. Dead, he said, for probably hundreds of years. If I was lucky, my brothers would have married and had children, and those children would have had children, and so on and so forth until it came to be that I had family alive -- distant, but still around. It was unlikely, though.
He helped me place where I'd come from in time, what year it might have been and where I was in the official record, and to get the documents I needed to mark myself.
"This was one of their sites," he said. "A Faery site. We're still finding people, now and then."
Tam himself had been displaced. "I'm from a little later than you," he said. "And I stayed a little longer. Still, though..."
Few people had ever stayed as short a time as I had and yet been flung so far. The mill, or the remains of it, were completely gone. Cottages had been built in its place, summer rentals.
"It's not literally a hill," said Anita, trying to be nice. She was Tam's girlfriend, and had only lost fifty or so years. Her sister was still alive -- in her 70s, but still around -- and had taken her in, helped get her the paperwork. I envied her, in a way. At least her family got to know. "Sometimes it's a castle, or an old lord's holding, or..."
"A mill," said Tam. "Because they like to play near running water, like kids playing chicken."
"They can cross water," I said, remembering the stream I'd had to step over to get there. "I think."
Tam shrugged. "Must have been part of the later legend, then, after the magic started to die."
There weren't many of us. Tam said that he found, at most, perhaps two a year. I was the first for my year.
"There'll be another," he said. I got my hopes up, thinking it might be someone I knew, one of my sisters or someone else.
"Don't," he said. "It never..."
His experience had been literal, walking through a door in the side of a hill and into what he recognized as their kingdom. He hadn't gone alone, either. One of his childhood friends had gone in with him, intent on seeing him home safely. According to the record, he did -- and Tam didn't.
"I refused their food and wine," he said. "I carried iron in my pockets. I did all that you were supposed to do, and now..."
Anita always put an arm around him when he got like this, her gray eyes sad. "I did everything you were supposed to do, too," she always said. "And here I am."
The second arrival, when we found him that summer, was only a little more displaced than Anita, no one any of us knew.
"You see," Tam said.
I thought I could go back.
Tam had lots of stories, tales of people who overcame great hardships and made it home in the end.
I believed them, at least at first. Books were the one safe thing. I'd been taught to read with the family's Bible, and if the paper was different, if the type looked strange, if the language sounded funny, at least it wasn't so far removed from everything I knew. I loved what Anita called period stories, things set around the time I'd disappeared. I started with those, crowing about what the authors had got right or what they'd got wrong. I slowly moved my way forward, reading them, until I was more comfortable with the modern world.
I didn't read anything with magic in it. Anita said this was wise. The stories I read were all too plausible. None of them were about going backward or forward in time, but they were familiar — overcoming hardships of one kind or another. The heroine escaped from kidnappers and made her way back, or else managed to make it home after being married off against her will. There were challenges in these that felt insurmountable, but she always made it home.
I thought that could be me, too. I went wandering out on Midsummer's Eve, looking for a way under the hill.
The closest I came was a group of revelers in the woods, dancing to music that didn't sound like music. I joined them, and Tam had to come and pull me out — not because they were supernatural, but because I had misunderstood what they were and what they were doing.
"She wandered into a rave," he told Anita later, exasperated. "And would have stayed there all night, if I hadn't..."
She laughed. "Well, it's probably the closest thing to...well..."
Tam scowled and didn't say a word.
Anita explained to me, later, that magic was dead. "They're gone, babe. No idea where they went." She used slang when she was trying to be especially gentle with me, the new words softening the message. "No one's seen anyone from Faery in probably forty years. Even in my day..."
Even when she was a girl, they were rare. There was an attempt, a revival, something about magic and mysticism, strange writings about opening your third eye, but it was of a different sort. There was nothing about iron and salt and St. John's-wort, rowan and running water and wearing your clothes turned inside-out. Their magic was beneficial, safe.
"I don't understand," I said. "If they're gone, then how did I...?"
"Near as Tam can tell, they're still around," Anita said easily. "But they don't interact with us anymore. We're too skeptical, and all the real magic is gone from our world."
She sighed. "There's no way back, hon," she said, after a moment. "You can only go forward, yeah?"
"Yeah," I said.
I adjusted, slowly.
Tam helped me get my papers in order, and Anita taught me how to do basic things -- how to cook on a gas stove, how to use the laundry machines, everything that had changed. They let me live with them for six months, until I had the hang of it, more or less. I was nervous and didn't want to drive anywhere, refused to get in a car unless there was a pressing need, but I'd managed to learn what I needed to get through the day.
Tam arranged something -- I was never quite sure how -- to get me lodging, a little studio to live in and some money to live off of.
"This will be good for two years," he said. "Until you figure out what it is you want to do."
He and Anita helped me move the few things I could call mine, and went with me to the charity shop to find everything else I needed -- dishes and pots and pans and bedding.
"You'll be fine," Anita said, after we'd lugged everything up. "If you need anything, you've got a phone, yeah?"
I held up the little square of plastic with its comically large buttons. "Yeah."
"It's okay if you get nervous, the first night you're alone," she said rapidly. "It's -- different. Give us a ring if you need anything."
"Yeah," I said.
I adjusted.
Tam held meetings once a week, in one of the cafes off the town square. We met and talked about basic things like finding and keeping a job and how to learn to use a computer if you've never seen one before and yes, the world is very different, but some things are still the same: have you seen the fruit.
I went, at least at first, because I needed the connection, the community.
We talked a lot about what was different. There was a lot of complaining, different people who had been back for longer commenting that it was strange to have been vaulted so far into the future.
"Be glad the language hasn't changed much," said Tam. "There's some poor fool out there I rescued a few years back that only spoke a dialect of Middle English that hadn't survived. Imagine what life must have been like for him."
We all fell silent at that.
"What happened to him?" I asked Tam, as he gave me a ride home. He and Anita lived just up the road; it was where they stashed the new arrivals, as they called us, before we gained independence and didn't need such frequent checking-in.
"Hmm?"
"Your Middle English man."
"Oh," said Tam. He raised an eyebrow. "If I told you it was me, would you believe me?"
"Nah."
He grinned, a rarity. "Good on you. I made him up! Certainly gets people to be grateful for what they have though, yeah?"
"Yes," I said, and sighed.
I lasted a year and a day without a breakdown -- what the Faery rules said everything would take -- and then I lost my shit, as Tam put it.
"It's not fair!" I howled at him and Anita, having banged in through their front door without knocking. "I've been here long enough, I've done everything I was supposed to, and I'm still here!"
Anita tried to comfort me -- "It's not the end of the world, it's the beginning of spring and all the crocuses are out" -- but Tam didn't bother.
"Get over it," he said. "You're stuck here now. The modern world is shitty, yeah? It's not what you thought it would be? You're fuckin' miserable most of the time and know that everyone you loved isn't even bones in the churchyard anymore, they're dust, gone and dead and forgotten by everyone but you, because no one else ever knew 'em? Fuck off."
I stared at him, shocked.
"Tam," Anita started.
"Don't," he said, his voice bitter. "I know what you're going to say. Don't."
He glared at me. "It gets better," he said. "But you have to let it. This is home now. You can't go back, so you've got to make the best of it. All right?"
I swallowed hard. "All right."
I let go of the idea that I'd find a way back, that I'd go to bed one night and wake up in my own time to find it was all a dream.
I got a job working in a bakery. Once they taught me how to work the electric oven, that was all it really took. They loved the recipes I had for various things, even if they didn't taste right. The flour was different; there was too much sugar, they didn't use enough eggs, and the milk tasted funny.
"Chin up," said Anita, when I brought her and Tam loaves of bread in the evenings, complained about how displaced I still felt. "It gets better."
Tam eyed me warily. "It does," he agreed.
We'd never really talked, after the conversation on my anniversary. We didn't know what to say to each other.
After landing the bakery job, I started experimenting with baking at home.
Anita said that scent and taste had the strongest ties to memory, she'd read a study about it somewhere, and it was true that there was something about working in the bakery, the warmth and scent of bread dough, that reminded me of home -- of Mum on baking day, shaping all the loaves with help from me and my sisters. In times of plenty, we'd eat them with butter, and sometimes (if Dad had managed to bargain for it) with honey.
The first time I ate a piece of bread covered in butter, I cried -- not because it was the recipe I remembered, but because it was wrong. Close, but not quite. I wanted it to be real, and it wasn't.
I kept at it, in the kitchen, tirelessly working to make the loaf I remembered.
Anita made fun, but gently -- "love your job that much, babe?"
Tam didn't say anything.
I gave them all my castoffs, took new loaves to each of the meetings. I became known as the bread girl, the one who was excellent at baking, but constantly dissatisfied with her results.
"I'll know it when I get it," I told Anita, after she told me (for the twentieth time) that perhaps I ought to try making something else. "I need to get this. It's...important."
On my next anniversary, Tam brought me a peace-offering, a bag of flour.
"There's a man at the university who makes it," he said. "Trying to recreate old medieval recipes; I said that you were trying to do the same with bread, and he offered me this."
I took it for what it was and thanked him. We still hadn't quite made up; hadn't talked since the initial fight a year ago. I'd gotten closer to Anita, but there was nothing to say to him.
"Might help this feel more like home," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Well."
He disappeared before I could say anything else.
I made a loaf of bread with it, using what technique I remembered from Mum, and baked it in the gas oven.
When it came out, I knew I'd finally gotten it.
I let the loaf cool and then ate it with my hands, standing over the oven, not bothering even with the butter I had bought. I cried as I ate it, remembering Mum and my siblings, Dad. I wondered if they had ever realized what happened to me, if it would have made a difference if they had.
I finished it, and then I baked another, same as the first, and took it to Tam and Anita.
He was waiting at the door, when I walked up. This wasn't unusual; the gate to their yard creaked loudly, and they often met me at the door.
I handed him the loaf, wrapped in a dishcloth.
"Here," I said.
He nodded, took it over to the cutting board and hacked a piece off, still spongy, then spread butter over it.
He took a bite and closed his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "This is..."
"It's the right stuff," I said. "It's..."
"Home," he said. "You've given me home back."
I sighed, relieved. "Welcome home, Tam Lane."
He nodded at me sharply, just once.
"Welcome home, Jane."
And I knew, finally, that I was.
~*~
I don't usually give context on stuff, but I feel it need to add a little here:
If you're not familiar with the idea of being taken 'under the hill' or why it's important to carry iron, well, there is a Wikipedia page for everything!
Medieval bread was probably quite a bit different from ours, too, and you can read an entertaining post about it here.
I wanted to do something about coming 'home' when home is not actually 'home'. I live far away from where I grew up, and home has not felt like home in over a decade. Standing in my kitchen Sunday night and making a dish that my grandma used to make when I was a child, I felt a sudden connection to where I grew up, that time and place, and found myself crying at the idea that there is no going back, only going forward. From there, the idea of Jane and her plight was born. While she doesn't come home by sea, the larger meaning of 'nostos' is homecoming, specifically arriving home after a long and difficult journey, and the word itself means, in Greek, 'to return home'.
Thank you for reading.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-18 08:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-18 08:37 pm (UTC)I definitely thought about "reintegration into society" when I was writing...I'm really passionate about prison reform and coming up with a better way of introducing convicted felons into society to reduce rates of recidivism and break the cycle of crime/poverty that's so entrenched in the US.
I had a rough few years in my 20s, and feel like I missed basically all of the Obama administration. I've spent the last little while trying to catch up on everything and inform myself about what's going on in the world. It's rough stuff! I can imagine that finding out what went on during Vietnam, etc, would be challenging for similar reasons -- I find myself saddened or angry by things that happened, and suddenly aware of how they influence the direction the country is going or has gone, but powerless to really do anything about it. (Not that I would have had power at the time, but, y'know, I might have had the ability to at least say something!)
Regarding the job interviews and stuff, though, yeah. I'm in the middle of hunting for a new job, because my position is ending in the next few months, and I honestly can't remember the last time I applied for something that wasn't a "sure bet". The last three jobs I've had have all been like that — the interview, etc, was just a formality, because I'd already been told I was going to be hired. Now it's been ten years since I last had to do an interview, and I'm a completely different person. I have no idea what to do or say or what goes into a cover letter...thank God for Google, I guess. Can't imagine how you did it, since around the time you would have been looking, resources weren't as easy to find...
I've thought it before and it's worth saying now: I realize that it probably doesn't feel this way, but you're pretty brave to have been through everything you've been through and emerge...not unscathed, but at least able and willing to talk about the experience. I admire that about you. :)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-18 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 01:03 am (UTC)The trickery of fairies who don't look like fairies (the cleverest magic of all, really), and the horror of coming forward hundreds of years later and having lost everyone you loved, forever.
The guilt at knowing that they lost you, without a word, without the truth, and died never knowing.
I felt getting the bread right--finally right-- brought a sense of closure to Jane. In fully feeling what she was missing, she could mourn it and begin to let it go. It seems almost contradictory, but that sense-memory immerses you in a time and place, and the emotion comes in fully charged. You are forced to see and to feel what you've lost, and can then truly begin to mourn.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 02:49 am (UTC)I grew up in Texas, and had to move to Washington when I was in high school, a terrible time to move. It was so hard, and I couldn't make Washington feel like home then. So first chance I got, I moved to Los Angeles, and lived there many years until my husband was laid off. So we moved to Washington since my family is here, and we've been here six years. There are times I want to go back, but I know it wouldn't be going back anyway, it'll never be like it was, because things keep changing. Plus my family is here and now I have friends here, so even if we left, I'd be heartbroken and leaving home to find another home, ugh. I think that's why I love the song Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, because "Home is Wherever I'm with you" is my favorite lyric and just really resonates.
Anyway, I love what you did with this piece, it is excellent!!
no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 08:05 pm (UTC)You managed to bring a lot of emotion to it and I felt a little welled up at the end! This would have made a great novel if you ever wanted to expand it.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-19 10:22 pm (UTC)