That first generation in Year Zero all reacted differently to seeing the world they’d known wiped away in front of their eyes; Gøran Andersen, Uncle Trond’s dad, decided to plant a garden.
He worked on it his whole life; by the time he died, it was like one of those lehtos you told us about, Fuzzy-Head. They buried him there instead of cremating him or a ship-burial, and Uncle Trond made sure there’ll be people tending the garden for as long as Dalsnes stands.
Of course, not all of ‘em are volunteers: some are paid to be there, but some have to take a turn at trimming and weeding as a punishment, like I did.
When I was a kid, I was so impatient. I know, it’s hard to believe now, but back then I couldn’t stand waiting for more than a second or two for something to happen, and it caused a lot of problems when we were laying traps for grosslings during Hunting season. Uncle Trond was in charge of a lot of those, and eventually he decided that I needed to learn patience.
To be fair to Uncle Trond, he tried all sorts of ways before sending me out to his father’s garden, but none of them really took; I can be really stubborn when the mood hits me. Anyway, that’s when I learned to knit those little grossling snares you were so impressed by, and to draw maps from memory of terrain I’ve been over, but what really got me was when I had to tend the garden.
They showed me what to look for; it was a long list, and I kinda spaced out during the middle bit, but I was pretty sure I got everything important. I mean, all I had to do was trim the withered stuff and pull the weeds, right?
I just had to do it over and over, every day, until it all blurred together in an endless line of picking and trimming and trimming and picking… Aaaagh. I’m getting a headache just remembering it.
Anyway, one day I’m doing this and it’s all going blurry again, and I look up and Uncle Trond’s there, scowling like usual. I asked him what was wrong… and he told me. I mean, I was expecting him to tell me every little problem he had with what I was doing, but I wasn’t expecting him to tell me about how the garden was a microcosm (yes, Mikkel, I made him spell it for me) of Dalsnes itself.
Uncle Trond spent the next, I don’t know, hour or so telling me about the importance of maintaining and protecting what our forebears made and built for us. It was like all the worst lectures I’d ever heard rolled into one big pompous word-vomit, but I sat there and listened to the end.
That’s when he told me I could go back to my unit.
At first I thought I’d just heard what I’d been wanting to hear him say, instead of what he really said, but he sighed and told me that his little speech had been a test to see if the garden had finally managed to instill some patience into my rambunctious and fractious self. Since I hadn’t interrupted him with a hundred different questions or snarky comments, he was pretty sure I could be trusted to be patient when I had to be.
Uncle Trond did tell me that if I disappointed him, he’d bring me back to the garden… as fertilizer. I’m certain he wasn’t kidding, since I’d seen the mulcher working on some particularly gruesome stuff, but I never would’ve disappointed him anyway.
And speaking of disappointments, that reminds me of the time…
