Alder's Grove

This is written to wyld_dandelyon's prompt to my "Wild Card" square of this ladiesbingo card from 2014.

Aunt family, rather early on in Eva's story, I think.

It was a quiet evening, a Friday on the edge between autumn and winter. There was a fire roaring in the wood stove - their family liked to do things old-school when they could - and the lanterns were all filled and ready. Nights like this, the power liked to go out, and if there was one thing the family as a whole agreed on, it was that being prepared was far better than cursing the darkness.

Especially considering the darkness had a tendency of cursing back people like them.

Eva was playing cards - gin rummy, a relatively safe pursuit - with one of her older aunts. Aunt Karaleen had celebrated her hundred-and-third birthday just a few months ago, and while nobody would ever say one of their family was going senile, she did tend to forget what decade it was now, and she had a habit of wandering combined with the family's trademark stubbornness. About the only way to keep her in one place for any length of time was to entertain her, and tonight was Eva's turn.
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Is there more Aunt Family in the cards?

Evangaline was making chocolate fudge for the high school holiday bake sale.

In a normal house, in a normal family, this would be a nice, sane, normal activity.

In a normal house she probably wouldn't be using her great-grandmother's recipe, written out on an old index card, likely by her grandmother or her mother. Or she might, but she might not be using her great-great-aunt's measuring spoons, the ones that had a tendency to yell at you when you were going to put in too much of just about anything.

And if she hadn't been using her great-grandmother's recipe, she wouldn't have been grinding cinnamon sticks and dried cayenne peppers by hand, nor what she have been putting in a tiny drop of devil's tears or the shake of pixie dust.

Her family's fudge always sold out, no matter how many trays they made. "It just makes the holidays more magical," Mrs. Steinberg down the street liked to say, with a wink and a laugh that suggested she, too, kept her great-grandmother's recipes wrapped in silk and boxed in ivory and ironwood.

Evangaline always made sure to get an extra helping of Mrs. Steinberg's chocolate babka, too. It made the holidays feel... proper.

And maybe a little bit more magical.

I asked for Non-Addergoole Prompts here; this is to kelkyag's prompt.

The Aunt Family has a landing page here.

The day before Thanksgiving was, by family tradition, a day spent at the Aunt's house, cleaning, prepping food, and getting everything ready for the feast the next day.

It was two things notably: It was a day where the family chose to ignore all gender distinctions, and work as if everyone was one, and it was a day in which the Aunt of the family was expected to sit back and not do any heavy lifting, metaphorically, metaphysically, or literally.

Eva was, thus, hiding out in her kitchen, with Beryl and Stone, who were ostensibly sorting the cocoas to help Beatrix & Janelle make cookies. But, since they were sorting cocoa - and since Everyone Knew either Beryl was going to be the next Aunt, or they were going to have to throw everything on its head and let Stone be an Uncle, they were making cocoa, and talking to their Aunt Eva about scrying.

"So, there's a whole bunch of things going on." Eva swirled her cocoa and finished the last of the milk, leaving a long ring of grit at the bottom. "The first is simply focusing the Sight in a convenient medium - the cocoa. The second is the feelings you've got about doing something. So." She focused on the swirl, and smiled as she saw a cozy family scene around the big fireplace in her living room. "Cocoa tends to tell you warm, happy things. See?"

She passed the mug to the brother-and-sister team, and watched their faces light up as each of them sent their Sight into the grit. This was going to be a generation to watch, indeed.

For kelkyag's prompt to my December Bingo Card - it fills the Free Square.

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Evangaline modern-era. After Unexpected Guest, Followed Me Home (LJ), In the Cards (LJ),
Big Bad Witch (LJ), and Frog Pancakes (LJ)

---

"I could feel it, you know? In my toes. I was just waiting for you to decide to tell me."

Eva studied the boy in front of her for a few minutes.
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For kelkyag's prompt

"There's something to be said for being an orphan." Beryl stared into her cocoa mug; cocoa, by all that's sacred, please, not tea. "Or being raised by wolves."

"I hear you." Evangaline stared at her own mug - coffee, for much the same reason the Beryl was drinking cocoa. The whole family to come to to complain, and her niece had come to the Aunt. "They can be a bit of a double-edged sword."

"They have another edge?" She rubbed her knuckles with her thumbs; Eva found herself wincing in empathy.
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To lemon_badgeress's prompt.
After Visit (Footnotes), which is
after Genre, which is
after Sidekick, and so on.

Evangaline followed her aunt through the gate, and down the gravel driveway.

She did not ask Rosaria about the power vibrating through the fence, or the lines of power in the driveway's bushy borders. She was fairly certain her aunt could see them - Rosaria, too, vibrated with power in a way that the family did not acknowledge - and just as certain that she would tell Eva to figure it out on her own.

She did not ask, either, about the tall man with grey hair who was approaching them. The power in the road recognized him; it if hadn't his chin line and the set of his shoulders would have given him away.

The waver in Rosaria's step would have, before anything else. Rosaria did not waver, ever. And yet she hesitated. "Willard?"

"Aunt Rosaria. And...?" The man's approach was faster than it had any right to be. And he was tall, in a way their family wasn't inclined towards. Evangaline had to look up, almost craning her neck, to look him in his deep green eyes.

The eyes reminded her of something, although she couldn't put her finger on just what. "I'm Evangaline. I am very likely your niece, although I might be your cousin. I'm Ardella's daughter."

http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/pics/catalog/1561/31708

"Family, then. And are you the Aunt Apparent, or has Asta finally given up the ghost?"

There was no point in being surprised; if she could sense the power, of course he could as well. "Asta passed on a few months back. I reside in the Aunt House now."

"And Rosaria is showing you the ropes, because Asta wouldn't have known a rope from a snake. Well, come on in. I suppose I count as part of the ropes, these days."

"Especially with my nephew Stone coming into his own." Evangaline aimed her words carefully. She was tired of being spoken over like an errant child.


there will be more; it's been commissioned. Of course, you could always commission MORE.

To kelkyag's commissioned continuation of Sidekick. For the complete story, see here.

The Aunt Family has a landing page here.

"Tragic." Eva was finding her voice, although it was taking effort. "Aunt Rosaria, what are you talking about? There's nothing tragic about Uncle Arges, unless you mean those horrid Hawaiian shirts. And who's Willard?" She flapped her hand. "I know that Willard is Aunt Ramona's son. And I think you've said that he's like Stone, or he was, but he left the family. I didn't know people could leave the family." She frowned. "Aunt Rosaria, I don't normally sound this silly."

Her aunt patted her leg. "I know, dear. Believe me, I really do. I remember when my aunts had this effect on me. It's as if you are feeling the whole weight of the family staring down at you from one old lady, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't have put it quite that way..."
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To kelkyag's commissioned prompt, after Big, Bad Witch

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

"So." Eva stared at the boy over her orange juice for a moment. "Pancakes, little kid thing?"

"Are they in the shapes of dinosaurs?"

She smirked. "I only do that for kids that are still shorter than my knees. They're safe, normal round things."

"Will they turn me into a frog?"

"I don't know anything that can do that, legends aside... so probably not."
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Older Witches (LJ)

For lilfluff's commissioned Prompt.

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Evangaline modern-era. After Unexpected Guest and Followed Me Home (LJ)

Eva tried not to have any expectations or hopes about Robby being there the next morning.

She did, however, do a little research, sending out e-mails to cousins, nieces, and nephews of about the right age, until she got back an answer: Robert Thompson, lived about two miles down the street. He was a senior at Chalcedony's school, not a great student but not a bad student, rode the bus with the family kids. He was, Chalce said, a stoner, a burnout.
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Next: Big Bad Witch (LJ)

For moon_fox‘s prompt

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

The bonfire had died down to embers by midnight. The children were asleep, the husbands and brothers drinking beer and playing poker, and the sisters-in-law settled off watching the children.

Most of the older aunts and grandmothers had drifted off, too; this wasn’t really a time for them. This was a time for the middle generation; this was the hour to let their hair down.

Evangaline took the lead, with a literal pull-pull of her hairsticks, letting her bun release and fall down her back. “Well,” she smiled. “and the world keeps turning.” She lifted her beer with a smile.

“It does,” her cousin Suzanne agreed, as she finger-combed out her braid. “Blessings on it.”

“You know,” Beryl commented, imitating Suzanne, “the neighbors think we’re witches.”

“Let them,” Hadelai snorted. “They have as long as they’ve known we exist.”

“The air of mystery is good for us,” Fallon agreed, smiling. Her hair was cropped short and practical, so she shed her cardigan instead. It was summer solstice; she hardly needed it, even after dark. “And they do like our yard sales more.”

“Well, that has something to do with the occasional lucky trinket Aunt Asta used to ‘accidentally’ seed in, too,” Hadelai laughed.

“Or the ones Aunt Ruan would put in?” Suzanne chuckled. “Oh, I grabbed one of those one year – mom smacked my knuckles so hard, I couldn’t hold a pen for a week!”

Eva grinned, and then, catching movement out of the corner of her eye, looked up. “Janelle,” she called, because if she didn’t, one of the others would send the poor girl away again. “Kids asleep?”

“Like logs,” her sister-in-law agreed. “The men, too, and Mom Ardelia. Everyone but you guys.”

“Welcome to solstice,” Fallon laughed dryly. “No-one else can be bothered to watch the world flip over. Come on, pull up a rock and watch the fire with us.”

Eva hid her smile in her beer. She could always trust her sister to follow her lead.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/267035.html. You can comment here or there.

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.

For lilfluff's prompt.

The Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ.

Evangaline was doing interesting things.

They'd had a feeling she would, of course. She was strong, had always been strong, hadn't fought the spark, the way some of them do, did, and she was still young. It helped to come into it young.

Rosaria approved. Asta had been an engaging woman, certainly, but she hadn't been that flexible. They'd felt, not that any of them would have said so, that she was filling the time, filling the place until her successor was ready. And now that Evangaline was there, well...

...she was shaking things up a bit.
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For clare_dragonfly's prompt

Aunt Family has a landing page here on DW and here on LJ

Modern Era; see tree. After Visiting Aunt Eva (LJ

"All right, we've got one more box to go through." Eva smiled ruefully at her niece. "Thanks, Bell, I know this isn't really how you want to spend your Saturday night."

Bellamy colored brightly, confirming Eva's suspicions. "I don't mind hanging out with you, Aunt Evie. And it's kind of neat, all the old stuff that's all over your house. Doesn't the family ever throw anything out?"
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For JanetMiles‘s commissioned prompt.

Just after Heirlooms and Old lace (Lj),

and in the same setting as Estate (LJ) and Lost Spirits (LJ)

Commenters: 0

It took Evangaline’s family less than a week after her yard sale to start coming to her with complaints.

She had been expecting the nosy visits, wanting to see what she was doing with the old house, now that she had managed to clear out some of the clutter (or throw away priceless family heirlooms, depending on who you asked).

She had anticipated the complaints about her color choices, the inappropriate gifts of things to make the house the way her cousins, sisters, aunts, and grandmother thought it ought to be; she had come armed with several stock phrases to fend off opinionated relatives, the chief among them being, “If you’d like to live here instead of me, I’m sure you could paint it however you wanted.”

She had three unmarried nieces on whom she refused that line, however, and she paid close attention to the opinions of the youngest, Beryl. Their tastes weren’t identical, but there were enough similarities that she could allow Beryl to design a guest room to her own tastes – with the added benefit that such annoyed, distressed, and confused Beryl’s mother without in anyway giving her ground to stand on. There were benefits to being the maiden aunt.

She was still stripping out old molding and repainting the walls, taking every spare moment of time between work and other commitments to work on the house before inertia could catch up with her and resign her to chintz and floral patterns, and so she was in her oldest clothes and up on a stepladder in the living room when the first of the complainers came stomping in.

Her Aunt Antonia hammered a cursory knock at the door and let herself in, the way she probably had when the house was owned by her sister Asta. “Eva,” she snapped, “this rose you sold me is trash.”

“Hello, Aunt Tony. There’s tea in the kettle and cookies in the jar. I’ll be just a moment.” She didn’t bother turning to look. If she turned to look, she might make eye contact.

“Did you hear what I said? The rose is broken.”

“I’ll be right with you. I just need to finish the crown moulding or I’ll get lines.”

“Strip it and do it again. It’s a horrible color anyway. Asta never would have used something like that.”

“But she willed me the house, Antonia. I’d pass it to you, if you wanted it…?” It was a safe offer, after all.

“Tea in the kettle, you said?” Her mother’s oldest sister huffed into the kitchen, giving Evangaline time to finish painting the lovely plum shade onto the elaborate crown moldings. She wondered, in passing, if anyone else had ever noticed the sigils and signs painted tone-on-tone in the shadowed portions of the trim. She wondered if that’s why they were so worried about her redecorating.

She picked up her tools quickly, rinsed the brush in the laundry-room sink and then, having kept her aunt waiting long enough, headed into the kitchen. There, Aunt Antonia was perched uncomfortably on the narrow chair Eva kept bare of books or paperwork for just that reason, eating a cookie and drinking heavily creamed and sugared tea.

“Finally,” she huffed. “This place is a wreck, Evangaline.”

“I’m still moving in,” she answered placidly. “There’s a lot to be done, and a lot of moving about, and-” she brought it up even though she knew better “-I’m working it all around my job.”

“You don’t need to work now, you know. The family trust fund will take care of you.”

The trust fund had been left over from an era when women did not, as a general rule, work outside the house. Eva shook her head. “I like working. The house will take as long as it takes.”

“But you can’t properly host company until it’s done.”

“Well then, I will improperly host company until then,” she answered tiredly, clearing off the comfy seat and taking two cookies for herself. “Now. The rose?” Maybe then she could get her out of here.

“The rose is broken! When Asta was a little girl, it used to smell like flowers all year round.” She waved the glass sculpture indignantly at Eva. “Now it smells like stinkberries.”

Eva took it from her Aunt carefully. It hadn’t smelled like either flowers or stinkberries to her – and now that she sniffed it again, it seemed to small faintly of rosemary and sage. “Mmm. Perhaps it is.” Safer to agree than to suggest that her Aunt’s personality stank. “I’ll refund you the twenty-five cents you paid for it.”

“But it’s a treasure! It’s worth hundreds of dollars! The craftsman who made those was a friend of Aunt Ruan’s; he only made a hundred.”

“Mm, but you paid twenty-five cents.” She pulled a quarter out of her pocket and passed it over. “If that’s all…”

Aunt Antonia was only the first of the visits Eva received as a result of her yard sale. Some admitted quietly that the item they had gotten was a family treasure, charmed or enchanted or cursed in some useful manner, and worth far more than they paid. To them, Eva said “Keep it. It’s still in the family, after all, and I don’t need it.”

Some complained that the item they had thought was a steal turned out to be trash; Eva refunded their money if they were willing, or sent them on their way if they couldn’t let go of the thing. Some wanted to know what she’d sold and to whom; she did her best to ignore the ones that made that question sound like a demand. She had an inventory, of course, but it was none of their business.

She didn’t want to admit, either, that she hadn’t known about all the enchanted items she’d sold, some of them to complete strangers. She was fairly certain she’d kept the nastiest ones in the house, and the most powerful in the family, but the more complaints she got, the more stories of “Aunt Asta’s friend” or “Aunt Ruan’s associate” she heard, the less certain she was.

The complaints about the yard sale trinkets, like the complaints about the house, surged and trickled off, until she allowed herself to believe, two months later, that she was done with family meddling for a while. She had her music blasting, all the window open to the unseasonably warm autumn day, and her skimpiest, oldest tank top on over a neon-pink bra when her Great-Aunt Rosaria knocked on her door.

Eva tried not to squirm with embarrassment as she poured her grandmother’s sister a mug of fresh tea, having cleared off the most comfortable chair in the living room for her.

“The place is coming along well,” Rosaria murmured. “I see you re-did the protections – but, interesting, you got rid of the evil eye, there. I always thought that leant a certain urgency to door-to-door salesmen’s visits for Ruan.”

“I didn’t like the FedEx guy dumping and running quite so much,” she admitted nervously. “You don’t mind the plum?”

“I think it makes it look like a French Whorehouse in here, but if you want that look, it’s your house. That’s how the thing is set up, after all.”

“Thank you.” She wracked her brain, trying to remember what her oldest surviving relative had bought at the yard sale. “No problem with the doilies or the ash tray then?”

“Aah, the tatting whines sometimes on a cold night, but it’s always done that. Surprised Asta kept it around. And the ash tray – well, when you want that back, dear, come and get it. I came to bring you these.” She pulled an ancient-looking ledger book and a slightly-more-modern spiral-bound notebook from her bag. “I can’t find Elenora’s or Zenobia’s, and neither could Asta – you might try between the walls.”

Not wanting to look greedy, Eva leaned forward carefully towards the books. “I’m sorry…?”

“Their catalogs. Asta gave me these before her death, to keep them out of her sisters’ hands. I wanted to see how you handled the hodgepodge on your own before I gave you her notes.”

Eva’s heart skipped a beat. “And…?”

“I’ve been watching you since you moved in here, dear. I’d say you’ve been showing very discerning eye.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/163546.html. You can comment here or there.

Mirrored from Alder's Grove Fiction.