This one's dedicated to the FREEZING RAIN OUTSIDE AGH

[moonsheen]

Her husband is a very kind man. The house they share shakes in the higher winds, but the roof doesn’t leak, and there’s enough wood for a fire. Their child is just beginning to walk, and life is perfect. She’s very lucky, and she knows it.

Her shirt is hand sewn, made of coarse, poor quality material that nonetheless she stitched together with the utmost care. Needle work saved her life; gave her purpose, made her useful to a region suspicious towards strangers, and led her to her husband, who is in fact, a very understanding, very kind man. Who else would marry a lone, foreign woman, who came ill prepared for the winters without even a name behind her? It’s the least she can do, to sew a shirt in gratitude. The cloth is not the fine, colorful silks she remembers wearing as a child, but it keeps her warm, keeps her alive, and doesn’t remind her of the night she ran from her father’s house, the shouts and the blaze from the torches at her back.

Silk is a cloth for green summers, anyway. Here there is only brown at best for a couple of months, and white the rest of the year. Food is meager, bland to taste, but it fills the stomach, and here no lord has ever asked a new servant why his steaming bowl of soup has suddenly gone cold. There are no questions at all in her husband’s house, and so she gladly cooks him dinner. He doesn’t even mind when it’s a little cool—that’s the way things are and he is, after all, a very kind, patient man. She’s so lucky to have found him. She thanks the gods for it all the time.

Their child is very beautiful. He’ll be strong one day, she knows it. Strong in the way her husband is: An ordinary, honest strength that will help with work in the spring and bring for security in the winter. His father will teach him to move snow—with a shovel. With his arms. She will teach him how to sew. Even if it may not be seen as proper for a boy, it’s the one thing she’s glad her mother gave her. A needle saved her life.