Preparing a Garden (Open)
The kitchen plothole has ceased giving food, and Kyllikki has taken the sudden change with equanimity. In Saari, she spent her childhood working in the barns and the gardens, hands gloved to protect their softness; in Lemminkainen's kingdom, she did the wife's work of making cheese and churning butter, growing grain and making it into bread, helping to dress meat and cook it for supper. It is not a hardship, to lose an easy means of gaining food--it is only a return to the everyday, the expected.
Indeed, she thinks that someone must have planned for the day when the magic went away, for there are seeds in a shed by the garden. She has only to rake the earth loose for planting (there is no permafrost here; it is a wonderful thing, a strange thing), and then to pat her seeds gently into the soil. It is an arduous task, and one that makes her back sore--but her hands are gloved, and her apron is full of seeds; she is humming a song about a maiden who lives beneath the earth. She would not mind sharing the labor, or sharing company after.
Indeed, she thinks that someone must have planned for the day when the magic went away, for there are seeds in a shed by the garden. She has only to rake the earth loose for planting (there is no permafrost here; it is a wonderful thing, a strange thing), and then to pat her seeds gently into the soil. It is an arduous task, and one that makes her back sore--but her hands are gloved, and her apron is full of seeds; she is humming a song about a maiden who lives beneath the earth. She would not mind sharing the labor, or sharing company after.