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Eleventy-one Years: Too Short a Time   by Dreamflower

  Chapter 32: Harvest Time

They did indeed arrive at the farm in time for second breakfast. Adalgrim and his brothers-in-law were already out in the fields with the farmhands from both the Took and the Goldworthy farmsteads, but Periwinkle was at the house and welcomed them with sausages and fried potatoes and eggs and freshly baked scones slathered with creamy butter and honey. The working hobbits would not be back until luncheon, for they took their second breakfast and elevenses with them into the fields.

She was glad to see them, and they regaled her with family news as they ate, and they played with little Pearl and held tiny Primrose, and for a while Bilbo was able to forget Siggy's astonishing and discouraging news as he held the baby and tried to coax dribbles of porridge into her mouth. She kept trying to wave away the spoon to eat the porridge with her fingers, and Bilbo got quite a lot of it on his shirtfront. Siggy laughed at him, and Periwinkle apologized, her cheeks red at the baby's behaviour; but Bilbo didn't mind--he liked babies.

The two lads offered to help Periwinkle with the washing up, but she shook her head. "You lads travelled all night long to be here," she said. "Rest while you can, for after luncheon you'll be working hard enough!"

The guestroom was in the newer part of the house, and was large and airy. Whitwell had begun as a smial, but the hill into which it was burrowed would not support further delvings, so when it had been enlarged, the hobbits had simply built onto it, so that it was now half house and half smial. The gauzy curtains at the window danced in the breeze, and the quilted coverlet in shades of green on the large bed looked comfortable. Siggy flung himself down on one side, and was asleep in minutes. On the other side, though, Bilbo lay awake for a long while, thinking of his dashed hopes.

He'd been prepared for the news that perhaps someone else was courting Pomona, but the news that she'd gone for a healer's apprenticeship was something he had never imagined. Healers seldom wed, and when they did it was quite a scandal. Mistress Rose Greenhand had wed Farmer Cotman of Bywater and it was still spoken of by the gossips in low voices as "not proper, not proper at all!"   A number of her patients in Hobbiton had left her because of it; Bilbo's mother had scoffed at the attitude, and said "Why shouldn't she wed if she's in love? Why, my youngest brother's wife is a healer!" but her voice was a minority, and was discounted because after all, Mrs. Baggins might be the mistress of the Hill, but she was born a Took, and everyone knew that they did not understand the importance of respectability over in the Tooklands. It wasn't a very good example; the youngest of the Old Took's sons, had after all, gone on an Adventure!. Belladonna's neighbours and in-laws liked her well enough (except for Uncle Longo and Aunt Camellia who had never liked her) but they did not regard her as particularly sensible and proper.

And Mistress Rose had been nearly forty! He knew that was not regarded as old for a hobbit, but to young Bilbo it seemed a powerfully long time.  And Michel Delving! If Pomona had only been apprenticed to someone in Tuckborough or someplace like that, he'd probably still have a chance to see her once in a while and find out if he could win her regard enough to overcome scandal and duty. If she came to feel about him as he did about her, he might stand a chance some day. But she was in Michel Delving, a place his family rarely ever visited. It could be as long as seven years or more before he saw her again!

These thoughts swirled around in his head over and over, but after a while, exhaustion overcame him and he fell asleep.

Periwinkle awakened the lads for luncheon. It was a huge affair, served on long trestle tables in the farmyard, enough food for all the hired hands as well as Periwinkle's brothers and cousins. Siggy and Bilbo sat next to Porro, and they dug into the hearty fare set before them: freshly baked bread, pan-fried chicken, stewed greens, and roasted vegetables.

Porro filled them in on the afternoon's task. "We'll be finishing up the barley at our place today, and bringing it into the threshing barn there." Siggy had never done any harvesting of grain, though he'd helped out with the harvesting of potatoes and turnips and other root vegetables before. Bilbo had helped Farmer Button harvest his rye a couple of times, so he had some idea of how to swing a scythe. Porro and Bilbo explained it to Siggy, and Porro promised to show Siggy what to do.

"Be sure to wear your hats," Adalgrim reminded them before they headed out to the fields. "The Sun can be wicked hot out in the fields!"

It was a hot and tiring afternoon, and the harvesters were tired, sore and dirty at the end of the day. They all washed up in buckets by the well before Periwinkle and her mother and sisters-in-law laid the table for supper.

After supper, Bilbo fell into bed too exhausted to even dream, much less to stay awake nursing his broken heart. He slept soundly and woke early to the smell of first breakfast.

The next day they began the harvesting of the Took fields: wheat, rye and hay (for the Tooks kept a small herd of shaggy little cows for milk and for meat, and hay would be needed for them for the winter. There were still vegetables to harvest as well. There were potatoes to dig, and beans to pick and the last of the cucumbers to be pickled and the onions to hang. 

A day was set aside for going into the small wood that bordered the edge of both farms to gather nuts and mushrooms and late berries and other things that could be foraged. Everyone enjoyed such a day, helped by all over the age of faunthood. They picnicked in a clearing in the woods for both luncheon and supper, and rode home in the farmwaggons, singing all the way.

Two weeks he spent at Whitwell, and then went with Siggy to the Great Smials for a few days. Then Siggy would accompany him back to Bag End and stay until his birthday. He'd be thirty-one this year. In two more years he'd come of age.

That was something he had always looked forward to before, coming of age, being an adult, growing into his duties. But now the thought of it made his heart feel heavy. It would be years and years before he could start a family, and that's only if Pomona would have him once she became a healer. And his future was bound up in his parents. The older he got, the more he began to realise that yes, he'd be the Master of Bag End and the Head of the Bagginses one day--and that day would only come when he was alone, when his parents were gone. It was hard to think of, and impossible to speak of, yet when he saw the pallor of his mother's face and heard his father's slow and laboured breathing, he could not keep it out of his mind.






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