Changing Seasons. Spring III, part 3

Spring III, part 3 Yep, this is me and the fish bucket again! It’s getting warmer, getting nearer summer, and Annette is getting bigger. And hotter. And grumpier. I didn’t think Annette had any mode other than cheerful, but she’s definitely moved over to tetchy from time to time. Quite frequent times. We’ve banned her from getting up early, doing too much…all the things that she just saw as normal nearly eight months ago. Clara practically seems to live here – she goes home to sleep! – but she’s actually the best at bullying Annette into submission. Or coaxing her, to be fair. Sometimes she’d just make Annette laugh herself into a better humour by asking the baby if it thought Mummy was over-reacting a little. Just because she was busy building another human being didn’t mean she shouldn’t be able to do everything else as well… I swear I could hear Marcus’s blood pressure going down sometimes. Maybe Clara has earned all the work on the tower she’s demanding from us. I’ve been borrowed again – honestly, my labour is lent around like a library book! I’m not too sorry to be on a horse again actually – it’s shovelling muck that’s the non-starter. Artie Campbell heard on the grapevine that I’d worked with horses and asked me if I’d put Old Pete through his paces, see what I thought. Hard to tell on the road, so I’m taking him to the old arena. Well, you can set him up nicely for the jumps. He’s an obedient horse – he responds well – but I don’t think he’s a great thinker. I think his rider’s going to have to be the brains of the partnership. Yep. Nice stretch over the jump, but there was a mare at the ranch who was as clever as a cat over jumps. You could trust her. This one? Dim but very willing, I’d say. And he’s not the fastest horse in the book either, though I think he’s got staying power. Hard to tell from a short trial. Now I’m going to have to work out how to tell Artie what I think… Well, I got a meal at the end of it with the two old-timers. I’ve been assured that Artie’s done a lot of cleaning up. It’s hard to believe…
“I see you do most of your livin’ in here.”
“Heck, yes! No point in having endless rooms to keep clean. Might as well just live in the one room. Don’t sleep here though. That’s not hygienic, sleeping in the kitchen.” They got onto the good old days and went upstairs (just as bad as down. Though it doesn’t smell, so actually I guess it’s clean enough) to look at an old poster of some cowgirl in a rodeo who came from round here once. Then they let fall a name that had me pricking up my ears.
“Remember Victoria and Albert’s honey? That was good honey. Best in the neighbourhood. I reckon it was all them flowers in her garden…” Victoria. That’s the name pencilled on the back of one of those photographs. There was writing under the photographs once, but it’s faded with time into illegible – and believe me, I’ve tried! Victoria is my only clue for names. My mother would never talk about her past and where she came from. “My parents, they had this runnin’ joke with Albert, ‘bout how he’d found his Victoria. They was real happy together.”
This might be them! I could tell that they were a happy couple by those photos.
“Shame they didn’t have no child to pass the farm onto.”
Not my grandparents then. “They had one girl. Real late on. Reckon it must have been after you moved away. But she wasn’t int’rested in no farmin’ lifestyle. Got herself some education an’ went an’ caught herself some rich guy. Johnson, I think his name was…and when the old folks passed away, she didn’t do nothin’ about the farm. Just left the place to fall apart. Didn’t even bother tryin’ to sell it. I think she was ashamed of her folks, but she didn’t have no call to be. Real decent, they were.”
“Real shame, that.” A farm, with flower beds and beehives. And Johnson was close enough to Jones as a name. This had to be it. It was still here, somewhere. I could ask where, but I want one more search myself. Or maybe two. And it the farm had never been sold…I could ask for it as my inheritance. My brother was going to get the firm, but I could have the farm. “Oh lovely fish bucket, how happy I am to be with you!” And that’s not a sarcastic comment either. Not today. Why the joy at being with the fish bucket? Marcus is letting Clara drive at least half-way to Newborough. And they’re picking Euan up and taking him too – he wants to buy something nice for Patience, just to tell her she’s special, which is kind of romantic, but whether he’ll be able to think straight when he gets there after being driven by Clara is another kettle of fish!
And maybe there’ll be some mail for me. See, I wrote to my family and asked for the farm as my inheritance. Gave my address as c/o the Newborough post office. Maybe they’ll have got back to me. They did. The farm is mine! There’s a whole lot of stuff I had to send back, all duly witnessed by a lawyer (that cleaned out my savings!) about me having no claim on the business or any other assets in the future, but that’s fine by me. All I’ve ever wanted is that farm. Now I need to find it – so I’m being logical and following the river round. The deeds and plans and maps will arrive soon, but I can’t wait that long! Following the river round and looking for some clues. There’s a bit of landscape in this picture, so I reckon I should be able to spot it. I’ve not had much free time at all lately, what with Annette getting slower and the church tower work as well. We need that tractor – or another farmhand, because once I find my farm, I’ll be leaving theirs. I can see Marcus and Annette’s farm from here. Good – I really want a nice cool drink. It’s hot out here today! And I’m cutting across past that tumble-down shed, rather than bothering to go round by the road. Let’s face it, no-one’s going to object! Tomorrow, I’ll follow the river in the other direction, past Patience and Euan’s house. There’s places along there I haven’t walked yet, and I’ve always had a feeling that it’s over that way. Wait a minute. That slope on the hill – there, by Euan’s house. I know that slope. I’ve stared at it so often on this photograph. But…this isn’t the house, surely? And there’s a barn. Roughly where the barn in the picture was. And the river’s about the right distance away. But how can this be the same place as the one in the photographs? Where’s the trees, the water tower, the beehives? Where’s that home I fell in love with as a child? We’ve painted the big upstairs room and made one corner of it into a nursery where Annette can sit and rock when all her aches and pains get Just Too Much for her. I wonder if Patience and Marianna found pregnancy this hard? Today’s first job – lifting these and taking them over to the graveyard for Euan to plant. Nice and early, before it gets too hot. And I think I’ll give them a good watering first as well. Being transplanted is always a bit stressful. The plants will be much happier when they’ve put their roots well down into their permanent home.
Hmm. That’s a bit of a metaphor for my life at the moment as well, isn’t it? And I haven’t told Marcus and Annette yet about the farm either. Better get a move on though – Marcus wants the truck today as well. Another trip over Newborough way. We’d just come in from weeding, Clara and I, for a much needed drink when we heard the truck pull in. And a few minutes later Marcus came prancing into the house and dumped a yellow car and a fistful of post onto the table.
“Nearest thing I could find to a toy tractor in the time I had to look,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “But we have a real one coming soon! That last batch of wine took our savings up over the tractor threshold! Blake, there’s some mail for you here too – stuff from lawyers and all sorts, in fancy envelopes. You’re not in trouble, are you? Can we help?” “Um, no,” I said. “You see, it’s like this…”
I could have done without Clara’s full attention. I didn’t get away with leaving anything out. Except for how my eight year old self had longed for a home where I felt I belonged and was wanted. I kept that secret. “But we have the tractor coming soon! Can you hang on here until Annette’s had the baby and recovered a bit, though? I don’t think that we could cope with losing you just yet.”
Well, that was a relief. I needed another month’s wages at least to finish covering all the legal costs – I knew those letters would also be demanding money for land registry fees and so on.
“Of course I can,” I said with enthusiasm. “As long as you need me for – there’s no rush on my part.”
I was going to miss this bright and cheerful kitchen. And I wasn’t too sure where I was going to sleep, eat or live on that soon-to-be-mine farm.


Blake and his house were made by Jessabeans. Link here for Blake
https://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=9352926
and here for the house
https://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=9352888
which I tweaked slightly to fit in with the landscape and the story.

Changing Seasons. Spring III, part 2

Spring III, part 2 It was pure coincidence that I happened to be passing just as Clara slipped and fell! Honest. I probably forgot to tell you what we’re going to be doing for her in exchange for all this “free” help. Only going up that scaffolding of hers to check out the stonework on the church tower. And then helping her clean it, if it’s safe to do so! She strikes a hard bargain. Marcus is planning to teach Clara to drive? Does he know what he’s letting himself in for?
“But how can I apply for a licence?”
“You can’t. Not yet. You’ll need an address and an identity. But I can start teaching you – and then you can apply when you’re old enough and have an address. You’ll be sixteen soon, but the address might take a bit longer to sort out. The streets are quiet enough here for you to learn the driving basics – and once I’m happy that you can handle the truck, I’ll take you into traffic bit by bit.” And off they went. Sooner him than me! He looked a bit worried, though Clara looked super-calm. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d been hot-wiring cars in her cradle. Or at least since she could toddle. But Marcus and Annette like and value her, so there’s obviously a lot of good in her. Somewhere… Let me show you what we built over the winter. Cellar and office above it. Everything’s on paper and in ledgers at the moment – seriously old-school – but one day (like when this place has internet access) we’ll go into computers. And downstairs… …we have new shelving, new stairs – and yes, a lot of brick that we repurposed from those old factories. Good job we did it before they had new owners – we’re probably going to have to negotiate our bricks from now on. And there’s wine already on the shelves. Hopefully, this will be the year we get the tractor. There is actually too much work for us all, but Annette couldn’t face hiring new people and having a new baby all at the same time. I guess I can see her point too. It’s a lot of disruption all at once. And I’m in no hurry to share my bunkhouse either. I’ll just carry on only having one day off a fortnight! Talking of my nice bunkhouse, I’ll show you why it’s taking me a while to find the place I’m looking for. I don’t have a lot of clues. I found this old album, in a pile of stuff my mother was throwing out, years and years ago, and just fell in love with the place really, I guess.
I was left on my own a lot as a child – everything revolved around my older brother really. My much older brother! My mother had him when she was twenty-two – and then me when she was forty-four. I was not an expected or a planned child, needless to say, and I don’t think she was any too happy about it. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I always had enough to eat and so on, but I just felt – well, extra. Superfluous, in fact.
It was always going to be my brother taking my dad’s place in the business. Not me. This is the house. Maybe you can’t see what I saw, but that small boy saw home. And I think that’s what I’ve been looking for all my life, actually. It looks like a lived-in, loved, cared-for place. But there’s no clue at all as to where it might have been on this picture. This is my grandfather. Actually, he was old enough to have been my great-grandfather really. My mother was their only child, and she was born when my grandmother was over forty. Late fertility obviously ran in the family! Anyway, you can tell that the farm was near water from this one, but there’s a lot of river round here.
I’ll show you the others later on. I’ve got a lot of work to finish off before I go round to Euan and Patience for tea tonight. “So why are Marcus and Annette blaming you for their unexpected pregnancy? I mean,” I added hastily, suddenly realising how that could sound, “I know they don’t think you actually caused the pregnancy so to speak…”
“Good,” Patience interjected.
“…but there is a general ‘it’s all your fault’ joke going on.”
“Ah,” Euan said. He actually blushed.
“Well…”
“Go on,” Patience said, with resigned amusement. “He’s a grown man. You can tell him the story. He can take it.”
“Well, we’d just decorated the b-bedroom. And it l-looked very romantic. B-but we aren’t planning on extending our family so I went to M-Minnie’s shop and b-bought the last p-packet…”
“Ah,” I said, putting him out of his misery. “And when Marcus went along a bit later on the same errand?”
“Quite,” Patience said drily. “And you know Marcus. Once he’s set his mind on doing something – especially that sort of something…”
“He wouldn’t be about to change his mind! He’d trust to luck…” “So what are you going to do about school for your children? Once they’re a bit older?” I knew Patience and Euan wouldn’t be moving.
“I’m a trained primary school teacher,” Patience said, surprising me once again. I mean, not that I think she’d be a bad teacher (in fact, I can see her being great) I just didn’t know that about her.
“We’re going to clear some classrooms in the old school, patch up the walls and so on. And then I’ll be in charge of Marianna’s four school age ones, and we’ll do a nursery-style room for my three…me, Marianna, Clara, Euan, Lachlan – we’ve got enough people power to cover all the bases. Annette’s baby too, when it’s old enough. And they can all go to high school in Newborough when they’re old enough for that.” This was the last game, and I might win it. If I could keep Patience off-balance…Distraction techniques to the fore, chaps!
“That sounds like a great idea! Do you want a hand with the general cleaning and repairs and so on? What needs doing?”
“Oh, yes please. We’re starting quite soon – why don’t you go and have a look? The key’s under the stone by the front door.”
Had I distracted her enough? No. I watched gloomily as she foured it up. She knew Euan and I were both knocking on fours.
“My game, I think,” she said smugly and sweetly. I was just about to go and check out the school, see what needed doing, when Clara came cycling past. But not from the direction of her home – odd, that.
“Hey, no doing anything here until you’ve helped me!”
“I haven’t forgotten. But you need Marcus as well – remember? So I’m just checking out what needs doing here.” “Look! An ancient dolls’ house!”
Typical girl response! I was busy assessing the window frames and wall panelling for wear and tear. “I think the windows look sound enough. And the external brickwork’s weathered well. But this internal wall’s not so good.”
“Brings a whole new meaning to the idea of open-plan classrooms! And I can’t see Barnabas staying in one room when he could get into the next one with ease.”
“Me neither,” I agreed. “Patience says she wants two rooms – one as a kindergarten room and one as a school room. These two look like the best two – side by side, nice and light and airy. What do you think?”
After all, Clara might be irritating, but she’s not stupid. She has a lot of good ideas. Might as well pick that sharp brain of hers. Turned out she knew the building (and its history of course) quite well. “Those two rooms and the corridor. Barnabas will be through every hole in these walls, including the ones at your head height. We can lock the other classroom doors, but we need this to be safe and to look clean and nice as well. There’s more to do than you’d think just for two classrooms, but when all this is done, there’ll be less to do for the other classrooms. This school originally educated up to secondary level, so it would be possible to do that again with low numbers…Depends on whether the children will want to stay here or go to Newborough when they’re older.”
“True. Good thinking – I’ll take all that into account. So where were you coming from when we met? Is there more I don’t know about this place?”
“Oh definitely.” Clara paused and then said, “Come on. I’ll show you.” I rescued my bike from the bike racks and followed her down the road. Had she found my farm before I did? But no, I hadn’t needed to worry. She took me down to somewhere I hadn’t been before, but it was a housing estate. “This one’s for sale. I want to find out how to buy it. I need an address if I want a driving licence. And I can’t go on living in a church forever either.”
Well, whaddaya know? Clara’s looking for a home as well. But it’s not as special as the one I’m looking for. A home and a happy couple living in it. I’ve finished Amber’s book, so I’ve got an excuse to talk to her again. Maybe I’ll show her these photographs - they might suggest a story to her.

The Christmas card garland is by Sandy at ATS3.
The holes in the wall at the school are by Cyclone Sue at TSR

Changing Seasons. Spring III, part 1

Spring III, part 1 Blake. Blake Jones, that’s me. And I’ve been here a year now, putting up with Marcus’s dreadful jokes and worse cooking, putting up a house and a wine cellar and being put up in a perfectly adequate bunkhouse, carefully furnished by Annette. That’s Woodside Barns I’m cycling past, and it’s not where I’m looking for. And this isn’t the place either. This is the Meithers’s place. I haven’t been totally honest with Marcus and Annette. Oh, not about my job experience or anything like that, just about my reasons for being here. I told them I was just drifting south sort of accidentally. But I wasn’t. I was heading here. The job ad just said: Near Newborough. I could have ended up forty miles in the other direction from here. But I didn’t. I’m here, and the Redstone River runs through the place. Here, where my grandparents' farm was. And I’m looking for it, but I haven’t found it yet. All I have to go by are a handful of old photographs – but the first time I saw them, I felt such a pull to the place, such a connection. I was only eight years old, but the dream has never left me. And I guess I could ask someone – little Miss Know-it-all at the church, or Old Tench…I know from him that this place belonged to the Preston family, that he was at school with Joe and Bess Preston, so he’d probably know who my grandparents were and where they lived. But I’d kind of like to find it for myself, rather than being shown it, if that doesn’t sound daft? A bit like the quest stories I loved reading when I was a kid. I know the farm was near water, but this scenery is all wrong. However, these look like unfished waters, and I always carry my rod on my bike. I know who’s going to be spreading fertilizer soon! Can’t complain about this! Fishing as part of the job description – that’s pretty good. Marcus and Annette will both be doing the same somewhere else – until Annette has to go and sit down and put her feet up for a bit. Marcus usually has to tell her to go and do it – she insists that she’s fine and so what if she’s six months pregnant.
I think it was a bit of a surprise to them both when they realised! I know it wasn’t planned. And for some reason, Marcus says it’s all Euan’s fault that they got pregnant, though I haven’t got to the bottom of that one yet. Might ask Patience and Euan next time I go round there for a games evening. Early morning, and it’s just me, Marcus and a bucket of smelly fish fertilizer out here. Annette has admitted that she needs to sleep a bit more! Plus, she says her stomach can’t take the smell of the fertilizer. I can believe her, though Marcus thinks it might be a cop-out. Clara’s round again to help, but she claims the smell – she said stink! – was too much for her stomach too. And she’s definitely not pregnant, so that is a cop-out.
The place is looking good, though, even if the smell’s not great at the moment. Very different from when I arrived! When I find my grandparent’s farm, I want to bring it back to life, like this place. It looks lovely in those old photos – welcoming, relaxing, prosperous…It’s only a little farm, not the money-making business that this will be one day. But I’m saving all my wages (there’s not much to spend them on anyway!) and Marcus and Annette have cut me in on a percentage bonus as well. I’m planning to be able to buy the farm back.
And to restore it. It will be my own place, and I will have rescued it, just like Marcus and Annette have rescued their place. So I’ve come to the library to see if I can find anything out here, though there’s not a lot of books here at all. Clara said she’d read something in her great-aunt’s letters about fine oak bookshelves, and should she really have painted them, but I don’t think any of this wood was ever oak and the paint makes things look a lot nicer.
I asked Amber what she thought about the shelves – after all, Rafe’s a sculptor, so she might know about woods – and she said she didn’t reckon they were either oak or fine. In fact she was a bit “is this it?” about the library until I told her what it used to look like! “Art work,” she said. “It needs art work. I’ll have a word with the others and see if we can come up with something.”
It needs more books, too, I thought. Then I went over to see what I could find – and there it was! A new book! The Scarlet Hawk, by Amber Oakfield. “You wrote this?” I asked. Politely, not in a surprised way!
Amber nodded. “I had a few spare copies, so I thought I’d put one in the library.”
“Thanks. Thanks so much. I love reading, when I manage to have some spare time, and a new book is just the best thing ever.” She smiled like she knew just what I meant.
The blurb on the back sounded really promising – my kind of book. “Young Justin, rightful prince of Amory, is forced to flee…On his journey he meets the wounded Knight of the Scarlet Hawk…” You can’t beat a good quest-and-kingdom-regained story, and I said so. It was good, too. I had to tear myself away from it, just as Justin and the knight (now healed from his wounds) were about to leave the monastery and set forth in search of a scroll that had been stolen from the monastery, in order to repay them for their hospitality. But I only get one free day a fortnight, and I want to explore further. And this road ends here, by Euan’s graveyard. Which I might as well go and have a look at, while I am here, but I know I won’t find my grandparents here. They were farmers, not employees at one of the factories. I see he’s started painting the fence. There’s a lot of it still to do! Annette’s flowers have taken nicely. She’s planning to give Euan some more this year – there’s little seedlings in pots all over the kitchen! And it always amazes me how grass will come back if you water a place. One day, this will look good again. Apart from the gaps in the fence, that is! It needs its trees back though – I could help Euan cut these dead ones down on one of my off days. Felling trees safely is not a one-man job. Okay, having Clara around a lot does mean that you have to put up with her sharp wit and quick tongue. Spiky is what she is – and she knows her own mind and what she wants too. For instance, all this help she’s giving Marcus and Annette – and she is a hard worker, I’ll give her that – is being traded for future work from Marcus and me.
But I was about to tell the plus of having her around – she’s a good cook. And Annette says the standing at the end of the day is getting too much for her – and at the beginning, it was the smells too. So that would just leave – cue ominous music – Marcus to do the cooking.
“You could do the cooking,” Clara said, rather pointedly, when I said it was much better eating her cooking than Marcus’s attempts at a meal.
“Bad use of my time and muscle. I will cook, though, if you’ll do things like digging out the cellar.”
“The cellar’s finished. You can use those supposed muscles to wash up after the meal – I’m sleeping in my own bed tonight.” This is a good hamburger though. I can’t see Clara as a character in one of Amber’s books – but she’d fit well in a modern novel as the spiky, feisty heroine. Smug and capable. I like my heroines a bit more romantic though. I wonder what Amber’s like as a person? When I’ve finished her book, I can talk to her about it. Shame it’s a fortnight until my next day off.

Clara was created by AlphaFen and can be found here:
https://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=9310815
Blake Jones was created by Jessabeans and can be found here:
https://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail.html?assetId=9352926
The little plants on the kitchen bench are by Sandy at ATS3