#32, Day-to-Day: Morning in the Garden
Originally posted here on February 17, 2022.
What is your favorite mundane noemata? It doesn't necessarily have to be peaceful, just something fairly normal.I've spent so much time thinking over how I want to answer #39 that I have neglected the less "deep" prompts for longer than I would like. Time to rectify that, I suppose. (If any part of this or any other prompt response I do doesn't make sense, you can check my
noematapedia post to try to make sense of it.)
I remember sitting in the garden of one of the chantries. Possibly the Genoa one... it had a nice garden, although I didn't go often. Italians and I don't always get along. It doesn't really matter, though, since this kind of thing happened frequently. I was sitting on one of the stone benches, inspecting the leaves of a plant and taking cuttings, placing them in a pouch at my hip. I kept sliding down the bench to different plants, occasionally changing where I was sitting entirely to take berries, leaves, thorns, stems, anything I needed off of other plants around the garden. Almost absentmindedly, I sang a quiet song, and the garden responded, shivering at the high notes and trembling all the way down to their roots at the low ones.
As I worked, I would occasionally glance over to my companion: Tremere, sitting on his own stone bench, huddled over a couple of books, tracing a drawing of a ritual circle with a finger and mumbling to himself, taking notes in a separate scrap of parchment. I'd smile, and my song would raise in volume slightly, words changing to be a call of his name. He'd look up, lock eyes with me, and beam like he'd never seen anything quite so wonderful, before going back to his work with a smile and not a scowl.
The quiet togetherness of it--not focused on each other, just performing our own tasks, mine of the alchemist and his of the ritualist, but never forgetting one another and wanting to be in the same place regardless... I miss it, dearly, but I get by with my headmates and with my memories, of warm sun and breathing plants, of a brilliant man and the promise of potions to keep us all safe.