The next day, I arrived at my grandparents’ house early in the morning. Grandpa Milton had specifically requested that I get there as early as I could. Planting ten rows of corn was going to take a while. When I arrived, he was waiting for me by the gate to the garden wearing overalls and carrying a couple buckets.

  “Good morning!” he beamed.

  “Hey,” I said with a yawn.

  “Is for horses,” he laughed. “Ready to grow some corn?”

  “Sure. What do I need to do?”

  “I’m going to poke holes in the ground with my finger,” he said. “I want you to come behind me and drop a single kernel into the hole and close the hole. The buckets are heavy so take a handful with you. I’ll put the buckets near the middle so you don’t have to travel too far.”

  “Alright,” I said.

  Grandpa Milton placed one bucket to the side of the middle of the ten rows. The other bucket went on the other side. I took a large handful of the soaked corn and followed him to the start of the first row. The corn kernels were cold in my hands. Even in the late spring warmth, it felt like holding ice. I shivered.

  He bent over and systematically made little holes in the soil with his finger. I waited until he was a few feet away and began my task. I dropped one kernel into each hole with one hand. With the other, I brushed the soil to fill the holes I’d put the kernels in. Every minute or two, I would have to jump up and get another handful from the closest bucket.

  I got dizzy bending over and standing up repeatedly. After three rows, I took a short break. Grandpa Milton joined me after be finished poking holes in the fourth row.

  “Why’d you stop?” he asked.

  “Feeling dizzy,” I said.

  “Have you been drinking enough water?” he questioned.

  “Yeah,” I nodded.

  “Well, then it’s probably from standing up too quickly. Try clenching your butt and thighs when you feel dizzy. It helps.”

  I nodded.

  I went back to work after taking a long drink of water. His advice turned out to help. Another thing that helped was that the bucket was now light enough for me to drag it with me as I moved. While that slowed my movement a bit, I didn’t need to get up anymore. That alone allowed me to plow through another two rows quickly. After that, I had to start using the other bucket after emptying the first.

  Two hours later, we went inside to clean up and have something to eat with Grandma Rose. Then it was back outside to weed. The peas Grandpa Milton had planted was prolifically producing, so he showed me how to pluck the ripe ones.

  “You can pick them early when they look like snow peas,” he told me. “That way, you can eat the entire pod and the small unripe peas inside. They’re very sweet. If you wait longer for the peas to mature, the pod gets less sweet and eventually inedible. However, that’s the stage of pea needed to keep the seeds to plant in the future. Always save your seeds.”

  He paused and held up a hand as if to stop himself.

  “Well, save the seeds of most things. If there’s a chance of cross breeding, some plants are either not true to seed—that is, they don’t have the same characteristics as their parents—or they have a high chance of making something poisonous. Most fruit trees and bushes are not true to seed but not in the dangerous way. Melons and squashes are the ones to watch out for. Tomatoes are fun to breed and you might end up with a whole new variety and have a chance of naming it!”

  “That’s pretty cool,” I said. “Have you named any?”

  He shook his head.

  “I haven’t intentionally made anything new, but I have by accident. The problem is that you have to be able to propagate the new variety to get it to be accepted. I wasn’t able to.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about. It’s a fun hobby of mine.”

  I helped collect the ripe vegetables. I ate a few while we picked them. I ended up with a nice haul—both of the vegetables and of experience. The bonus experience in every instance I gained experience made a huge difference.

  Picking quality vegetables and cleaning the stems off—or whatever they needed in order to be considered ready to be used—almost always gained me one or two Harvesting Experience. On top of that, I’d get another. That was a doubling of my efforts! I got even more experience from helping Grandma Rose turn those picked vegetables into other things.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  The small cucumbers got turned into pickles—along with onions and cabbage. The snow peas were used in the lunch’s stir fry. The bigger peas were pulled from their pods and left to dry for storage. She told me she would use them for split pea soup or keep them for planting more in the late summer for the fall harvest. All of those activities gained me more experience by the time Grandpa Joe picked me up from their house in the afternoon to go shooting.

  Over the next two weeks, I helped Grandpa Milton finish planting his garden. I assisted with the weeding and harvesting as well as helping Grandma Rose with preserving the harvest. At the same time, I spent a couple days with Grandpa Joe shooting the .22 rifle at the range. He’d begun to show me how to take it apart for cleaning.

  “If you shoot a gun, you’ve got to clean it,” he told me. “When it gets dirty, it won’t work right and might even fail when you need it most!”

  With Master Chang, I continued the same training in the beginner classes. Not every class had sparring, but it was something I did at least once a week. The other classes were about teaching proper form for punching, kicking, and blocking. Learning that in a slow and methodical manner allowed me to practice them while sparring. The goal was to write these actions into muscle memory so that they would be automatic if I ever needed them. Though I was improving, I was still at least a few months away from moving up to the next belt rank.

  “Are you ready?” Grandma Rose asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Today was the day of the workshop she’d told me about. It was something run by the local historical society in collaboration with the community college. Naturally, it was held at the community college. I felt strange returning there after several years away. As I was with my grandmother—and it had been long enough—no one seemed to recognize me. If they did, they didn’t bother me as we walked into the building that held the workshop.

  I entered the building with Grandma Rose. The workshop was on the first floor. We found our way there easily enough. The room was large with several machines to handle every part of the process—from processing the fibers into yarn and then weaving the yarn into cloth. I saw five people inside besides the two of us. There was an older woman—perhaps a few years younger than Grandma Rose—who looked to be the person in charge of running the workshop.

  “Welcome,” she said to us. “We’ll begin shortly. I want to leave enough time for the last stragglers to arrive.”

  We waited for ten minutes. Another four people entered the workshop in that time. When the woman was satisfied that she’d waited long enough, she got our collective attention.

  “Alright,” she said, “we’re going to start the workshop now. As some of you may know, long before machines automated the creation of fabric, it was made by hand. The fiber of choice in those days was flax. While most modern clothing is made from cotton, that fiber was traditionally more expensive and difficult to work with than flax. So, today, we’ll be going through the process of turning a plant into cloth. You’ll each have the opportunity to try the machines for yourself after my presentation. Sound good?”

  I saw people nod or mumble some form of assent. The woman then grabbed a handful of what looked like grass to my eyes.

  “This,” she said, “is flax. It’s been dried so that it’s easier to work with. The first thing that would be done is to break the stems—“

  She put the flax onto a jagged wooden paddle before crushing the similarly-shaped other side of the device. The flax cracked and crunched but remained held together by the fibers. She moved the broken flax stems and smashed them again and again.

  “—so that the fibers in the middle can be liberated. This was back breaking work as I’m sure you can imagine. In ancient history, the little bits of straw would be plucked out by hand. Thankfully, there are tools for this task. This comb here is meant to take out all the undesirable bits and leave clean flax fibers.”

  The woman pulled the broken flax stems through a device that had a wooden base and many rows of iron spikes sticking up out of it. The fibers slid between the spikes while the little bits of straw got caught in between and popped off. Some of the fibers were left behind by this, but the remaining ones looked clean and fluffy after several passes. She left the partially-processed fibers where they were and moved over to the next station.

  “Once the fibers have been separated, the next step is to weave them together. A skilled spinner could spin all of the fibers in front of me in under an hour. That was what women and girls would do during the winter to help make clothes or to sell to bring in extra income for the family.”

  She sat down at the spinning wheel. She wet her fingers in a little cup of water while her foot pressed a pedal that made the wheel begin to spin. Rhythmically, she pulled the fibers in and let the wheel twist them together. Periodically, she added more fibers to keep the string a consistent thickness. After a minute of spinning, she stopped and moved to the next station.

  “After spinning, the next step would be dyeing. The string would be colored one of many colors—yellow, red, orange, brown, black, white, and many others. The past was full of color and not brown sacks for clothing. After dying—and washing—was weaving.”

  The woman moved to the loom. She narrated along with her actions. She passed the dyed string through a gap between the vertical strings that she created by pressing a pedal. Once it was through to the other side, she pressed another pedal and moved the string back to the side it had started on. With each pass, she tamped the weave so that it would be tight.

  “This woven cloth is something you’ll be familiar with: linen. It could be rough and made into sacks or canvas. Or it could be very fine and made into very comfortable clothing or even turned into lace by a skilled craftsman. Different weaves and different qualities of linen were used for different purposes.

  “Now, who is ready to try their hand at the process?”

  Several people raised their hands—myself included. We were each given an opportunity to go through the steps. She’d been right that breaking the flax was a lot of effort. I managed to get a bit of the straw under one of my nails. Thankfully, a Heal took care of that before it started bleeding. We went station by station until we’d each had an chance to do everything. Of the stations, I enjoyed the weaving the most. It made the most sense to the way my mind worked. I wondered how much experience I would get if I grew the flax and turned it into cloth and then into clothing or something like that with the sewing skills I’d gained.

  Discord!

  Patreon with up to 15 chapters ahead of Royal Road.