Antonovka

by Soufriere

Chapter Nine: Family

During our trips to the Detrot Grand Market, Ma, Pa, and I were always on the hunt for things we could buy to improve our home after we’d sold out of our jam. My older brothers, however, were on the hunt for something else entirely.

And they found them. Manx Conlin met this nice mare from the Pyrus Clan, an Earth-pony named Forelle, daughter of D’Anjou, who ran a pear stand on the other side of the market. She was a beauty, I’ll give her that: gold with a pale green mane. Both were headstrong and believed in the value of a hard day’s work… and a hard night’s play, as we later found out. After a couple years of courtship …yes, we still did courtship in those days; don’t laugh… they got married and had a foal, Bartlett. Unfortunately for us, he also decided to ‘abandon’ us and set up with her family, as old farmer D’Anjou was not in the best of health even then. Ma was so angry over losing her oldest son and strongest worker that she banned anyone else in our family from ever courting any member of the Pyrus Clan, forever.

It took several generations, but you know how that edict eventually turned out. In hindsight, I regret going along with Ma’s insanity, generations after she was gone. Terrifying old nag.

Nickajack, meanwhile, was forced by circumstance to remain on the farm to help out our parents, which he probably would have done anyway even if Manx hadn’t left. During Manx’s courtship period, Nick met this sweet Earth-pony (race-mixing wasn’t really a thing back then) from Deer-Bourne, a tiny village outside Detrot. She was named Sweetgum, the youngest daughter of a family of hay farmers, only a few years older than me. Despite her strength and work ethic, her family was overburdened with too many ponies for one farm to sustain, so they were more than happy to have her move to our homestead once the courtship period ended in a wedding. I was glad to have another mare in the house besides Ma.

As for myself, well, I met many stallions, did more than a few things with them you’re still too young to know about. I would say this even if you’d been on this planet half a century. Yet despite several wanting to court me, I never found any of them worthy of my total devotion. So I stayed on the farm, working with jams and baked goods, increasingly taking over other household duties for Ma, since she never fully healed from that injury three years earlier and tended to give all of us the short end of the stick, more so as she got older. Luckily for everyone, Sweetgum and I hit it off right away; she quickly became my best friend in addition to my sister-in-law. However, she never could quite get the hang of my kitchen experiments. No one could. Pa would joke in his increasingly gravelly voice that I was an apple alchemist.

Time passed.

As our wares, including the home-brewed cider which was my idea, became more popular in the Detrot market, word about us passed to other villages and towns around the region. It would take time for Sweet’s kids to set up working farms elsewhere and the best recipes were still with me, plus we simply did not have the means then to travel to many other market towns without neglecting our own farm, so we decided to start keeping more business at home and encouraging ponies to come to us. Much to our shock, some did. Lured by a combination of a first crack at our wares and the area’s excellent soil (plus a tax break from Celestia’s increasingly centralized government for choosing to live so close to the still-dangerous Everfree Forest), a disparate group of Earth-ponies founded the village we now call home just a mile upstream from our land grant, nearer Canterlot. We were glad to have the company, although we were often too busy working to do much socializing with the newcomers, which might explain why our family has retained a dialect that never much existed in town.

It was an absolutely normal life, punctuated by the rush to preserve food for each winter, and the occasional birth of Nick and Sweet’s foals. They ended up having seven; you could say those loved each other very much. Five colts and two fillies. Didn’t take as much of a toll on her body as one would expect, probably due to her working outside whenever she wasn’t raising them, although a lot of that work was left to me, as I spent much of my day inside anyway. Over that period, we added on rooms to that little log cabin to make room for a growing family until it had become something quite beyond the shack it originally was. Sweetgum’s youngest daughter, named Apple Cobbler for her colouring, turned out to also have a knack for cooking. So, I began training her in the ways of the kitchen: making jams, pastries, vegetable stew, and of course working with those bizarre rainbow apples that can be so temperamental but so worth it.

The thing about having such a regular schedule, you might call it a rut and you wouldn’t be wrong, is that you tend to lose track of time. The days pass into weeks, which pass into months (or moons if you prefer) which bleed into years. Eventually it becomes impossible to tell what happened exactly which year. Ma grew older and crankier, to the point that Sweetgum and I felt it best to keep the foals away from her on her bad days, which increased as time moved ever forward. The foals grew up, as foals do, into fine mares and stallions. A couple stayed on the farm, including Apple Cobbler and Sweet’s oldest son Ribston Pippin, but the rest left to set up in other parts of Equestria, leading to our far-flung extended family. In days without mail service, trains, or any other means of quickly sending information short of hiring a Pegasus courier (which we couldn’t afford), we resolved that the entire family, including Manx’s descendants if they had apple cutie-marks, should meet up at our farmstead once every few years in our family reunion tradition that continues to this day.

During one of these reunions, in 785AB I think, after Ma finally passed and Pa wasn’t long from doing the same, I was working with Sweetgum prepping the next day’s feast, and I noticed she was showing her age. Well, raising seven foals to adulthood and then taking charge of the business side of our farming – Nick was never great at numbers; that’s one of many reasons she was his ideal companion – must’ve finally taken their toll on her. I asked her if she was feeling okay. Much to my surprise, she narrowed her eyes at me in irritation.

“Of course I’m not okay, Annie,” groused Sweetgum. “I’m getting old. I’m already a grandmother twice over with another on the way. Even Cobbler has been checking out some of the stallions from the new village; within a couple years she might be popping out foals. My joints are starting to hurt and my eyesight isn’t as clear as it used to be.”

“Well, that happens to all of us,” I replied.

“Not to you,” she snipped. “Annie, you look like you’ve barely aged a day since we first met over thirty years ago. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were barely out of your teens.”

I cocked my head in confusion. “Well, you know I ain’t much younger than you, Sweets. Maybe I’m just aging gracefully by staying inside doing most of the housework instead of kickin’ trees.”

Sweetgum shook her head. “There’s aging gracefully, then there’s you, Annie. I really do like you. I’m happy we’re ‘kin’. But I can’t help but feel jealous every time I look at you now. And it hurts.”

Slowly, I stood up from the workbench we were at, slowly plodding my way back into our home, through the living/dining room, towards Sweetgum’s room. She had brought back a mirror during one of her trips to the Grand Market and set it up at the end of the hallway extension. Since I still used the bedroom in the original part of the house, I rarely went further in. Apple Cobbler did the cleaning everywhere but the kitchen, so I’d never cared about the mirror. After all, when you work from dawn ‘til dusk, why worry about your appearance? But that day I decided to give myself a look-over.

Sweetgum was right. I looked like a mare in her early twenties at the latest, possibly younger, despite being past fifty. It’s no exaggeration to say I was shocked at my own appearance. Sure, I had birthed no foals (not for lack of effort on several stallions’ parts), but that could not explain away a complete and total lack of aging. I was absolutely flummoxed.

I also knew there was only one pony I could turn to to give me an answer.

I packed some provisions, including that medal thing the Moon Cultists gave me, still untarnished after so long. I’d kept it hidden. Didn’t want any of the family asking questions.

Briefly rejoining the mounting festivities, I told Sweetgum truthfully I needed to make an emergency trip to Canterlot, giving her a hug and saying that I would hopefully be back before the reunion was over.

That did not happen.

Comments

[Mx Story Anomalax]

That was a really good summary chapter, and it helped add to the enjoyment that there was a little bonding moment between Sweet and Annie. All I could possibly ask is a little more... I don't know, like... affection or something? It's not relevant to the chapter and it'd be mostly filler but I feel like it'd help demonstrate the familial relations a little more.

Either way, great chapter. The succinct-ness of the summaries and Sweets/Annie's conversation were my favorite part. They got across everything they needed to, especially the passage of time.