a Stardew Valley fan fiction: The Proper Care and Feeding of Souls

Chapter 3: The Art of Letting Go

Home is not where

you are born;

home is where all

your attempts

to escape cease.

- Naguib Mahfouz

Grace felt bad doing it, but she also felt like finding herself meant letting go of enough of the past to make room for the future. She had spent the past few weeks engaged in the physically and emotionally draining work of sorting through decades of the remnants of her grandparents' lives, determining what was valuable, what wasn't, what was meant to be held, and what was meant to be released.

Early one morning, sitting on the floor of a spare room, she came across a tattered old box overflowing with yellowed pieces of paper, most of them covered with her gran's scrolling script: Ralph's Fav. Potatoes, George's Spicy Eel. Chocolate Cake. E's Preserves. These were her gran's recipes and quite possibly the most treasured item she'd found. To be kept, for sure.

She also found plenty of items that were easy to let go. Perhaps it was the fact that they had lived through the depression, but Grace was amused at mundane items she found stashed away, just in case: old half-empty packages of paper napkins, scrap pieces of cloth, large sealed containers of essentials like flour and salt that, even though sealed, had surely gone bad. There were sentimental items too, like old birthday and holiday cards, saved newspaper clippings, and boxes and boxes of photos. Grace packed these up in a large box and shipped it off to her mom, who she thought might appreciate the family history they represented.

As she lingered over the photos before packing them up, she found two she ended up keeping. The first was a photo of two beautiful young women, her gran and a woman Grace didn't recognize, sitting together on a large picnic blanket, their dresses spread out just so. Their mouths were open wide with smiles so exuberant she imagined they must have been laughing. Behind them were two handsome young men, holding fishing rods. One was her grandad. The other, she didn't recognize. Grace was drawn to this photo. It was a glimpse into her grandparents' lives when they were roughly her age. To see them young and beautiful, laughing with friends. It felt like a priceless moment worth preserving.

The second photo was one Grace found an old frame for and hung on the living room wall. It was of her gran and grandad standing together on the veranda in front of the farmhouse. Grandad had his arm around gran's waist and she was resting her head on his shoulder. They looked young, probably in their early 20s, and they looked happy, excited, smiling with anticipation of their entire rich and wonderful lives that lay before them. That photo captured something that Grace desperately wanted for herself. It was an ode to possibility, a declaration that the future would be met with joy.

Grace arranged for most of the old furniture to be hauled away, except for her gran's old armchair, an exquisite deep teal velvet that had been protected beneath an old cloth covering for years. This, Grace carefully cleaned and set in the master bedroom where she could sit and watch the sunrise while sipping her coffee.

The house was now clean and practically bare, but the memories, they permeated the air. They clung to the walls and embodied the very soul of the farmhouse. Grace imagined her mom growing up here. She remembered fondly, the summers she spent here. She thought of the birthdays celebrated, the heartaches that surely were endured, the life that had been lived here. Most curiously, she wondered what life was like for the young couple from the photo she'd hung on the wall. After all these years, their love had created the legacy that Grace now held in her hands.

Grace couldn't totally see the possibilities in her future yet, but she did feel ready to set the stage. Furnishing the house was going to be easier than building a life to fill it. Between the savings she'd built up from the well-paying, soul sucking job she'd had to all she'd gotten from the sale of her old life, she had a good amount of funds and this seemed like a worthy enough endeavor to justify digging into them. The rejuvenation of Morse Farm had begun.

*****

2011

Robin's body ached. The kind of ache that icepacks and painkillers don't fix. Sebastian had been gone for 2 days. His caseworker at the pediatric psych unit at the city hospital would call once a day with an update. The rest of her time was a blur of anger, sorrow, fear, and guilt. Her face throbbed from sobbing, her mind, numb.

Robin sat on the hardwood floor in the darkness of their cramped home. Even in the silence, the anger, the screams, all of the incomprehensible acts that led to this moment, they were clear as day to her. They lurked in every corner and permeated the air with their stink. She could not escape them.

Hardly feeling of her own free will, Robin stood in the dead of the night and pulled from the garage, a sledgehammer. The weight of it was more than she expected. Dragging it into the house, the anger welled inside her. She could hear Joe's voice, feel Joe's lashings. No more, she thought, no more.

With a reservoir of strength foreign to Robin, she heaved the sledgehammer into the wall of the house and watched it crumble. Satisfied, she swung again. And again. And again. Demolishing the dwelling that had held all of the heartache and evil she was determined to escape. After hours of destruction, Robin fell to her knees, exhausted, she covered her face with her hands, trying but failing to think clearly.

Quickly with shaking hands and a fiercely determined heart, Robin packed a small backpack of Sebastian's favorite things and tossed her wedding ring onto the floor. In the garage, she found the gas cans to ignite the fire, and with one match, her old life became engulfed in flames. She was not going back.

"Here is the world.

Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don't be afraid."

- F. Buechner

LISTEN TO THIS....

NORTH by SLEEPING AT LAST

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AUTHOR'S NOTE:

If you're reading this, you're awesome and I'm grateful for you! xo