In other words, I was asking to eat meat. Tuuli pointed to the storage room in response and said I could use the bird meat in there.
“Okay. I should just rub salt and herbs onto it, right?”
Tuuli shook her head. “Some herbs aren’t good for people who’ve just given birth. Just use the salt,” she said before heading downstairs with our laundry-filled tub and some soap.
I preferred herb-seasoned meat to plain salted meat, which was a shame, but if Mom couldn’t eat it there was no point in me making it.
“...If herbs are out of the question, I should at least use a little bit of Dad’s wine,” I said to myself after seeing Tuuli off at the door. I went back inside and headed to our winter storage room for the meat, and then went to fetch Dad’s wine from the kitchen shelf.
He would always desperately try to stop me whenever he saw me getting the wine to use for cooking. He said my food tasted more than good enough even without the wine, but I knew he just wanted to keep as much wine for himself as possible.
...I don’t care how much Dad hates it; I’m using this wine! There’s a huge difference between meat prepared with wine and meat that isn’t.
After massaging the meat with wine and salt for a bit, I started chopping the usual vegetables. There were still a lot of dangerous ones that I found hard to prepare, but naturally by this point even I could tell the difference between safe and dangerous vegetables.
“...Hm? Wait, am I worse at this because I’ve been in the temple so long?!” I exclaimed. My cutting rhythm was shaky and off since I had spent so many months living the life of an excessively pampered rich girl in the temple. My hand was shaking just from holding the knife.
“Aww, this sucks. I was at rock-bottom before when it came to doing chores, and now I’m below even that. I need to make a habit of doing chores every day,” I said, bemoaning my drop in skills while taking care not to cut my fingers along with the vegetables.
“Oh, this is vargel. Sautéing these with butter is better than putting them in soup.”
Vargel looked like white asparagus on the surface, but flavor-wise it was more like baby corn. It tasted great and reminiscent of spring when boiled and cooked with butter, or just mixed with cream.
“I’m back!” Dad declared in a jovial, drunken mood, Tuuli following closely behind him. She had finished the laundry while I was cutting veggies.
“You go hang these, Dad. We’ll get supper ready,” said Tuuli as she handed the newly washed diapers to Dad and went to put the tub back in the storage room.
Dad spread out the diapers and hung them on the multiple strings stretched high in the air across the kitchen, close to the ceiling. I was a little bothered by the fact he was doing that while I was cooking, but I had to suck it up since Kamil needed dry diapers.
“If only it were sunny so we could hang them outside.”
“Yeah, the rain sucks. It really gets in the way when we’ve gotta dry these every day.”
Having a ton of diapers swaying all over the room was incredibly distracting. It just wasn’t a sight I was used to, and only when they were spread out like this did I appreciate how invaluable disposable diapers really were. Not to mention that these weren’t the white diapers I was used to from my Urano days—they were long strips of cloth made from sewn-together rags, and had gotten soft and thin due to repeated washings, which was about the only good thing about them. I wanted to push for us to use something more hygienic, but we were just using what we had. Besides, I already knew they’d say they didn’t want to waste new cloth on diapers that would end up getting just as filthy in no time at all.
“How far did you get, Myne?”
“I finished cutting all the vegetables I can cut. Looks like the season for vargels is almost over. They’re pretty hard now,” I said, showing Tuuli the out-of-season vargels.
“That’s ’cause we’re almost halfway through spring now. Vargels last a long time when spring stays cold for longer, but I care more about being warm. There’s more stuff to gather in the forest when it’s warm!”
Tuuli cooked the meat with salt and dressed it with the butter-sautéed vargels. I used that time to make the spring vegetable soup.
“Myne, go call Mom,” Tuuli said.
I stealthily slipped into the bedroom, trying my best not to wake Kamil. Mom was sleeping next to him. Maybe it was due to the dark room making it hard to see, but she looked exhausted and kinda sick. I didn’t really want to disturb her, so I silently stepped back into the kitchen.
“Tuuli, it looks like Mom’s asleep...”
“That’s okay, you don’t need to wake her. Mrs. Karla was talking about this; she said it’s really important to give a mother as much rest as possible after a birth,” Tuuli explained as she set the table. It seemed the neighborhood wives had told her about a lot of stuff while she was helping with the birth. Mom looked like she would be out of commission for a decent while, which meant we would need to cover for her as a family.
“You may not realize this since you weren’t there, Myne, but Mom really had it rough when she was giving birth. She was bleeding a lot and it sounded like it hurt really bad,” Tuuli murmured, anxiously looking at the bedroom where Mom was sleeping.
I had been sent away for this birth and hadn’t witnessed any back
