The first month after the funeral is hard. Mom doesn’t leave her room for anything, and I do my best to keep us fed and watered and (mostly) clean, but we don’t have enough stores to last much beyond that even with what I can coax from the garden.

It doesn’t take much asking to get help repairing the front door, and replacing what can’t be fixed in the wall and frame. The new door is rough, doesn’t quite fit over the threshold, and reeks of fresh wood. I'll get a better replacement in the future, but without an immediate way to craft it myself I can only put up with what I have, stuffing a blanket in the gaps as the nights get colder and longer. My Naming day is midyear, but in the mountains, the length of day matters little with the horizon being so high, and the onset of fall means the onset of fall weather.

By the time the eleven-day palm of the month rounds out and the midmonth rest comes to pass, along with that first anniversary, I’ve managed to get Mom out of bed exactly once to wash her and change out the sheets on her bed. Every other moment she’s wasting away, thinning to nothing from how little I can get her to eat and keep down.

I can understand the grief. I can feel the pain of loss. I just wish she would talk.

The trees are ablaze with color when the donations start arriving. Piles of dried meats, enormous jars of pickles and preserves, loaves of bread and live doughs, and all manner of supplies from kindling and new blankets to whole sets of clothes (under and outer) in anything from brand new to clearly, if only slightly, used.

If I weren’t certain they would refuse en masse, I’d at least have tried to trade some of Pop’s stores of potions and poultices back. Instead, after organizing a winter’s worth of stores, I set about practicing what magic I could. The fall air is chilly, and stores aside our firewood won’t last an entire winter.

Snow is starting to fall in flurries and fizzles around the time I get a hang of cutting down trees (after several failures at replicating an ax with stone, I fill a pair of gloves with gravel and use them to grip the actual woodcutting ax.) Pop’s advice about visualizing intent shines through into every success I find, and it isn’t long before I'm lopping down and chopping up a tree each month to add to the woodpile in stumps and logs and split lumber.

The first time the skies empty a proper serving of heaping, freezing snow, long after the yellow and orange leaves have turned to brown, I decide the door has to be replaced when the wet soaks through the blanket I’d stopped up the gaps with. It even manages to bleed all the warmth from the house while leaving a ridiculous puddle on the floor. Carpenter or not, I’m not intending to spend the whole winter cleaning up a frigid entryway.

Glad it’s all water, I easily push it all outdoors and create an empty frame along the inside of the doorway out of stone. It’s a little slanted and not quite a proper rectangle, but it’s close enough to hold out the worst of it.

Outside, a younger tree maybe three times my age – and at least a dozen times over my height – comes down and is turned into suitably hefty planks. Some of the remains are cut out for support pieces, and I lay them over the frame before sawing them to size. It's relatively easy, though getting nails from the smith is a chore with snow at my waist level hampering the way to town.

It's nightmarish, how much water damage has built up on the temporary door's exterior. A stain I’d been ignoring out of necessity, but it throws a wrench into the plans built around the raw wood I have piled up and ready for assembly. At least the latch and hinges can be salvaged.

The next time snow falls heavily, little more than a handful of nights later, I relish the aid of Egg Man. He gave me a jar of foul-smelling oil which, after it dried overnight, has utterly weatherproofed the wood of my new front door. It’s also cut tightly enough that no air gets out, and the main room retains some warmth even long after the fireplace has gone cold.

I don't get much else out of Mom by the time spring comes around. Mr. and Mrs. Doil help me with reading and writing once the snows melt, and I immediately set about learning Pop’s recipes and notes word for word, making my own additions as I go. By the time the last of the snow is reduced to slush hugging tree trunks and outcroppings, I’ve got enough confidence in my ability to reproduce his more common recipes that I start setting them aside for sale, rather than as experiments.

I also have an absolute mountain of mistakes, mess-ups, and outright failures. Most curiously are the potions, which would have no effect when made improperly. They retain a blue glow, of course, and the flavors and smells don’t seem to change, but a notable absence of intended effect is present in all of them. As soon as I figure them out, however, I start going out and harvesting ingredients around the valley, their locations listed in the journal’s extensive ingredients list. I didn't get anything close to exhausting Pop's stores, but it wouldn't be any good to continue burning through them when I'm able to get more.

In the end, it doesn't take long for me to be able to see I don't quite have the touch Pop did when it comes to poultices. The cringing smiles, the pity purchases, the over-enthusiastic trades are all too clear to me, though maybe the adults are less transparent since I'm still young.

If only potions could do more, I make incredible potions.

Summer’s earliest harbinger is the yellow-neck finch, an obnoxious bird for its habit of snatching anything remotely ripe on a garden’s plot and leaving the unsuspecting owners with, on occasion, nothing at all.

In short, they’re greedy little shits and make wonderful scarecrows when stuffed with overripe peppers. All the better that I have spring greens still sprouting anew despite the growing heat. They are growing just fine next to ripe squash meant to be planted at the start of fall, which means making sure the birds don't get a funny idea about when food will be available for them to pick at.

I'll need to work on the scarecrows.

I’m checking on the plot of the garden set aside for my experiments when I hear one of the noisy little bastards flitting overhead. It doesn’t reach the far end of the yard before the pebble I shoot it with finds it mid-air. The benefits of being able to attack it from any angle, or something, I just want them to leave my project alone and maybe not spread a potentially invasive species of magical plant all over the valley.

The project involves the potion brewing accidents I spent a huge chunk of winter and spring creating. At one point, boredom had me drop a few plant seeds into one of them. The next day, a leafy plant was sprouting from the small potion bottle.

Now I have three levels of density for emptying a potion into the ground, burying a bottle upside-down so it feeds into the soil, subsuming bottles entirely both upright and inverted, and as with the first seed, simply submerging them directly in a potion.

Much more importantly, though, Mom has started knitting again. She’s made covers for both tables, as well as a pair of cushions for the dining chairs.

When she stops some months later I figure she’s simply lost interest, until I find the beginnings of a third cushion. The first year anniversary of Pop’s death passes much the same as its first coming. 

All the same, it passes.