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