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Dark Blue Sky
Dec. 24th, 2003 10:39 amYesterday we had one of those perfect Colorado days. I went outside just after noon and found the sky to be perfectly blue without a cloud in it. The temperature was quite good for winter at about 14°C (57°F), I could just barely see my breath at times. There was a smell in the air like winter; distant hillsides covered in snow melting just a bit, a slow gentle wind over cold ground. It made breathing feel like when I would put an icicle in my mouth when I was a youth. Cold, but pleasant.
It was the same sort of day south and west of Pskov when Raina came to her great-uncle's estate. He had died, against many people's expectations, peacefully in his sleep two days earlier. Many relatives that had been excluded from his house for years would gather and tell polite lies about how sad they were that he was gone. Probably the saddest person at his wake was Raina, though many relatives muttered about her having come out of this very well indeed, since she would inherit the estate of Ivan Radoslav Obeczan.
She stood much of the day a solid bulwark covered in black velvet against the hoards of relatives both close and distant. She quietly fended off veiled appeals for money from the less sensitive and gracefully absorbed the kind platitudes of sympathy from the more considerate. He had been an unconventional sort, the black sheep of her paternal grandfather's generation. She thought about this as the endless stream of cousins, nephews, nieces, and the assorted hangers on filed past her after having made sure the old goat was really dead in the front parlor.
"Conformists. Dutiful servants of the temples, good workers with comfortable to good jobs, and a careful number of children as proscribed. We are a well off family, though aside from Ivan we would never be mistaken for a leading one. They saw his wealth and clucked their tongues that so much should come to someone who would do so many unacceptable things like slumming with the Otrok class. Do any of them ever think that maybe it was because he was unafraid to do almost anything that he became wealthy? Probably not."
It was the same sort of day south and west of Pskov when Raina came to her great-uncle's estate. He had died, against many people's expectations, peacefully in his sleep two days earlier. Many relatives that had been excluded from his house for years would gather and tell polite lies about how sad they were that he was gone. Probably the saddest person at his wake was Raina, though many relatives muttered about her having come out of this very well indeed, since she would inherit the estate of Ivan Radoslav Obeczan.
She stood much of the day a solid bulwark covered in black velvet against the hoards of relatives both close and distant. She quietly fended off veiled appeals for money from the less sensitive and gracefully absorbed the kind platitudes of sympathy from the more considerate. He had been an unconventional sort, the black sheep of her paternal grandfather's generation. She thought about this as the endless stream of cousins, nephews, nieces, and the assorted hangers on filed past her after having made sure the old goat was really dead in the front parlor.
"Conformists. Dutiful servants of the temples, good workers with comfortable to good jobs, and a careful number of children as proscribed. We are a well off family, though aside from Ivan we would never be mistaken for a leading one. They saw his wealth and clucked their tongues that so much should come to someone who would do so many unacceptable things like slumming with the Otrok class. Do any of them ever think that maybe it was because he was unafraid to do almost anything that he became wealthy? Probably not."