To Live is the Rarest Thing

Chapter 6

Chapter 6

Harry wasn’t the most patient person in the world, and he was well aware of this. Yet waiting for Rosier to find Tom the wraith required a generous amount of it, since Tom was hiding in a mountainous wilderness area and it might take Rosier weeks and weeks, if not months, to track Tom down. So in order to keep calm and not vibrate out of his skin in anticipation, during the next few weeks Harry made an effort to keep himself busy.

It was something he and Tom had learned over their many lifetimes anyway, that if you had all the time in the world, in multiple worlds even, the most important thing was to find meaningful ways to spend that time. It was also the reason the both of them had spent centuries, if not millennia at that point, learning many, many different skills. Everything from playing musical instruments to computer coding to DIY skills to arts and crafts and almost any kind of sport. They’d joined any number of clubs and organizations, from volunteering at animal shelters or soup kitchens for the homeless to spending all their weekends LARP-ing somewhere in nature with other likeminded individuals.

Not only did it save them a lot of money over many lifetimes, since they had a lot of skills and experience to do any sort of mundane task themselves instead of having to pay others to do it for them, but it also helped to stave off one of their worst enemies during their many, many lives: boredom.

And thus Harry took to foraging the many hedgerows around Little Hangleton during his walks with Quinn and Lucy. He brought home buckets of rosehips, which he turned into syrup, and elderberries, which he turned into wine. He found a veritable jackpot of nut trees growing in clusters around the cemetery on the hill and he collected piles of sweet chestnuts, hazelnuts and walnuts, and turned them into homemade granola with oatmeal and honey, and moist nut breads with raisins which he ate covered in butter for breakfast. Harry also found many edible mushrooms growing in fields and patches of forests. Harry had learned the skill of foraging for mushrooms all across the world during more than one life. And it was very much a skill one needed to learn. The dumbest thing anyone could do was go out foraging for wild mushrooms without knowing what they were doing.

You did not want to accidentally mistake a death cap for a horse mushroom. As the name implied, things wouldn’t end well. An emergency liver transplantation was pretty much the best case scenario you could end up with. But Harry was confident enough in his skills that he brought home a whole smorgasbord of edible fungi; field mushrooms, wood ears, butter boletes, chanterelles, hen of the woods and even some morels he found behind the churchyard, growing in some flowerbeds that were lined with woodchips.

Harry turned them into creamy mushroom soups and risottos, which he shared with Cindy, much to her delight, and with his now weekly dinner guests, Sirius and Remus.

Several times a week Harry popped over to Grimmauld Place, to help Sirius and Remus with curse-breaking and remodelling. They’d taken to tackling one room at a time. They would get rid of whatever cursed items were sitting in that room, strip it bare while Sirius decided which pieces of furniture and decorations he wanted to keep, and then completely redo the room itself, from wallpaper to carpets or floorboards. It was hard but satisfying work, which Harry was glad to help with. Sirius in turn looked visibly happier with every room they finished in the old house, that step by step stopped resembling a haunted mansion and instead became a comfortable and welcoming town house.

Once a week, on Friday nights, Sirius and Remus came over to Harry’s home, so Harry could cook for them to his heart’s content. Harry treated them to some of his favourite dishes, which were many and varied. Tamales with pork, one of Harry’s favourite Mexican dishes, though finding the masa harina and dried corn husks in 1990 Britain took some work, but Harry finally tracked down a small Mexican speciality store in Suffolk and stocked up on all his Mexican favourites.