Words on Wednesday ~ 8/25

This month, [David M Gascoigne] is providing the prompts for Words for Wednesday, but they are being hosted on [the Elephant's Child blog]. Started by Delores ages ago, it is now hosted by different people each month on various blogs around the world. The aim of Words for Wednesday is to encourage us to write using some or all of the prompts.

~*~

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  When they were within 100 yards of Eahldun's tiny village, he asked her to stop and wait there. The underbrush was quite formidable and Alvina was worried that she might step on someone who was hiding beneath a leaf or plant that she couldn't see. As she stood there, waiting for him to come back and tell her what he found, she thought about the last 24 hours. Normally, Alvina was very reticent with her feelings having lived alone for so many years in her isolated house. But here she was, very close to tears for the second time that day, hoping against hope that the village and its community had somehow survived the attack.

  Her father had been a famous naturalist in his younger days and had taught her about the plants and animals in the area. But as she glanced around her, she realized that there were many plants and small insects that she had never seen before and wondered if they were part of that world she forgot as she became an adult.

  Alvina's mother, on the other hand, had come from what her father called a very hoity-toity family and had thought that by marrying a famous naturalist his fame would extend to her, something that her vain ego craved. The combination of the two produced only Alvina who had been more like her father than her mother could stand, and she would often exude such an unspoken dislike of her husband and child that they spent more time in nature than they did indoors.

  The strident criticism of her lead Alvina to indulge in copious amounts of sweets for a time in her youth, and if it had not been for her father's salient encouragement of her love of nature she might have been lost to depression. One day as a teenager, she finally had the temerity to stand up to her mother's cutting words and insulting euphemisms. At that moment everything for her changed.

  Not long after that day, Alvina's mother went to visit her parents. Happy to be able to be in the woods without having to feel guilty, it was almost a month before father or daughter even realized she had not returned from what was to have been a two-week visit. When her father called to inquire when she would be back, he was told never and to not contact her again. The fame and fortune she had imagined she would gain when she married him as a young girl had not materialized, and she had wasted her youth on him and her daughter. Now she was bitter and old, her resentment of the two making her as ugly outside as she was inside, and she was left with nothing but to care for her aging parents and hope for a sizeable inheritance.

  Alvina had not missed, or asked about, her mother again.

  Hearing something coming towards her in the underbrush, Alvina caught her breath and hoped that it was something small and not one of the large wild dogs that Eahldun had told her about. When she saw a long column of people and farm animals coming towards her, with Eahldun in the lead, she breathed a sigh of relief. It appeared everyone had survived, including Floria, although some with broken bones and other injuries.

  Eahldun had explained her offer of sanctuary to the community and they had unanimously agreed to accept. Gathering as much as they could each carry, and loading what they could on the backs of the farm animals, they had arrived at her feet with hope for the first time since the attack.

  The picnic basket she had brought to carry them out was barely large enough to fit everyone, and so she carried some on her shoulders, in her pockets, and those men who could walk lead the larger pack animals ahead of her with Eahldun leading the way back to her car.

  Glancing up as they exited the forest, Alvina felt her father smiling down upon her. She was about to begin the greatest adventure of her life.