[OPEN] let the year and its curses conclude

[tehilim127_1]

Who: Zivia (tehilim127_1) & all comers
What: Autumn and the High Holidays
When: Late September through October
Where: All over
Warning(s): To be added as relevant

1. closing the year

Early in September and Elul, Zivia wrote a letter.

A few days later, the Visitors' Center went up, and among the visitors were two of Zivia's dead. No one else was present for her conversation with one of them.

The next week, she went to a certain shady merchant, grimly determined to speak to him about procuring certain items and to pay whatever he asked. She did not expect him to already have them on hand, nor to insist on giving them to her without payment. Perhaps that should have felt like divine providence of some kind; for some reason it did not make her feel any more certain that she was doing the right thing. Nonetheless, she brought the items home and sent word to Anzu and Lyubov that she had, baruch Hashem, acquired a shofar and a lulav -- with accompanying willow and myrtle twigs but not, unfortunately, with an etrog. Which meant pinning their hopes on the Paradesium expedition. (Where they were to begin with, so that's all right.)

During the last week of September, Zivia went out to the old Starr farm to gather a basket of apples and some honeycomb from the hives; talked to Captain Dominguez of the Limoncello and gave him a long and detailed list of requests, heavily featuring kosher meats and cheeses, to be compensated in all the citrus fruit she can carry when the expedition returns; talked to various people at City Hall about the time off work she would need in the coming month; found a source in town for canvas sheets and wooden beams; and put up a notice on the town bulletin board: Help Wanted with Minor (Temporary) Construction Project.

(She also kept her ears open for the general mood of the town in the wake of Dahlia Leeds' party and its shocking revelations. Any angry talk that grew vicious, she did her best to quietly defuse; any fearful talk that verged on panic, she did her best to subtly soothe. She knows too well that this could easily get ugly, in ways that could be much harder to fix than to prevent.)

It's now the first week of October, the last week of Elul. Zivia can be found at home whenever she's not at work, either working on the mysterious construction project or seemingly endless baking: cakes, cookies, tarts, a half-dozen round braided breads. She'll happily explain what's up with all of this, should anyone ask.

[Tag Zivia here for anything in late September or pre-holidays October, including if you want to help with the construction or talk about last month's events!]

2. days of awe, days of joy

And then it's second week of October, the first week of Tishrei.

Rosh Hashanah: two days of feasting and prayer, bringing in the New Year, beginning the Ten Days of Repentance. Lyubov blows the shofar at their little communal prayer services, where they say what parts of the liturgy they can without a full quorum of ten, and maybe a little more besides. They each host meals, with the round challahs and the apples and honey (from the Starr farm and from Angel's gift) and other traditional symbolic foods; Zivia is particularly thankful that they've been able to get pomegranate. Cecil Palmer is invited, and Hawkeye Pierce, and anyone else who's shown interest in participating in Jewish traditions.

Ten days later, Yom Kippur: fasting and prayer and atonement for sins. Again the little prayer group congregates, and Zivia recites the familiar words through an unexpected struggle with tears. Do not cast us away, Lord our God, do not distance Yourself from us --
(She still doesn't know if trying to speak to the local goddesses is something for which she should be asking forgiveness. She doesn't know who to talk to about that, or how.)

Five days later, Sukkot: a week of feasting and celebration, with festive meals in the completed sukkah. If you've befriended Zivia, or if you work with her, or if you answered the bulletin board request to help build the thing, or even if you're just passing by and want to know what the deal is with the weird little structure with canvas walls and a roof of Paradesium greenery, you will get an invitation to come hang out. Inside it's decorated with ribbons and paper chains and fruit (including tiny gourds) and colorful fall leaves, and there are snacks and both cold and hot drinks and occasionally a friendly cat winding around people's ankles, and at the slightest provocation there will be stories and anecdotes about the holiday. You've been warned.

At the end of that week, Simchat Torah: the last of the holidays and in some ways the hardest to observe in their current circumstances. No Torah scroll has shown up at Calloway's, so the best they can do is read from Lyubov's chumash, the end of the final chapter and then the start of the first, beginning the cycle again. There's too few of them to dance properly, but they can and do sing.

[Tag here for religious holiday celebrations if your character would have been at any of them, or for hanging out less formally in the sukkah!]

3. back to the everyday

And then, as every year, the holidays are over. Time for taking down the sukkah, putting away the components in case they need to be reused next year, carefully storing the shofar wrapped in cotton in the china cabinet, planning future meals around frozen leftovers: an end to the celebrating of life and a return to living it.

For the rest of October Zivia is back to her usual routine. Find her at work, or shopping downtown, or having a drink down at the Oak & Iron on occasional evenings -- or, once in a while, taking a walk on the beach while it's still warm enough to do that.

[Tag here for after the holidays, at any of the named locations or your choice of wildcard!]

Comments

[saltwaterlungs]

"Oh- I met Monsieur Anzu, back on the bug ship. He's... really cool, and Lyubov seems cool too," carefully leaving off the gendered honorific because he's not sure which one to use.

"Same when I saw Mulcahy was still doing sermons. It felt really ehn... safe."

[tehilim127_1]

"Yeah." A little more sober, a little softer. "You never really know, in a new place, how anyone's going to react. Like, what the baseline's going to be. So it helps to see what's already going on and being accepted, and then you can say all right, if people are okay with that, they might be okay with me."

[saltwaterlungs]

"Something like that," Darcy muses.

"Nice to get to bring something with me anyway. Something I can't be made to leave behind. Ehn- I don't want to like, be weird about it, but can you tell me about this thing we're building?"

[tehilim127_1]

"Nothing weird about it! Well, nothing weird about the question, the answer's gonna be a little weird the way rituals can get sometimes. This is called a sukkah," she pronounces it with a long u like the vowel in soon and the accent on the second syllable, "which can also be said sukkah," this time with the accent on the first syllable and the u closer to the vowel in book, "and translates to something like 'hut' or 'booth'. And coming up in a few days is a holiday called Sukkot, or Sukkos," with the same shift in vowel and emphasis, "which is just that same word in plural. Commemorates both the old harvest season and the Exodus from Egypt -- if you're Catholic, can I guess you know that story? Israelites freed from slavery, received the Torah on Mount Sinai, wandered in the desert for forty years?"

[saltwaterlungs]

"Plagues, golden calf, mhm," Darcy affirms, having the plagues from Prince of Egypt firmly stuck in her head now, "no leavened bread because of all the moving around, and. Something about one giant frog? I can't remember if that was a meme or actual scripture."

Gestures for Zivia to continue.

[tehilim127_1]

"Kind of both! The text says frog at one point and frogs at another, and that might be just poetic usage in the singular, but there's one interpretation that it started as one giant frog that split into a swarm of little frogs."

She takes another cookie, gestures with it. "So anyway -- during the forty years wandering in the desert, the key word there is wandering, as in not settling anyplace permanently. So the Israelites lived in these temporary structures, tents and booths, and to commemorate that we're supposed to live in something similar for a week in the fall. Right around when the weather gets chancy, in other words. The Rabbis ruled we don't have to stay outside if it rains, but otherwise -- too cold, too hot, too windy, we gotta live with it."

[saltwaterlungs]

"Brutal," Darcy says with pretty clear admiration.

"I think the closest we get to that is like, midnight mass at Christmas. And that's not meant to be brutal, it just kinda is because it's always cold and the place my family went to mass was up a hill."

Kind of cool of the Rabbis to say that they can go inside if it's raining though, that's nicer than any of the rulings the Doctors of the church have ever made.

"So it can't be like, too nice and well-built or else it doesn't count?"

[tehilim127_1]

She nods; midnight mass she's heard of, of course, but the weather difficulties involved in walking there in late December hadn't really occurred to her before.

"Oh, it can be pretty well-built -- in fact it's got to have walls too sturdy for wind to knock over. But the important thing is, it can't have a solid roof. This --" gesturing at the currently open top of the structure -- "is gonna get a covering called s'chach. Branches, or anything else that comes from a plant but isn't still growing out of the ground. Enough so there's more shade than sun, but you need to be able to see the stars through it."

[saltwaterlungs]

"You guys seem to have like, a lot of really specific instructions. But in a kind of nice way. Like, almost comforting. If there was something that was unclear or whatever, it's already been worked out."

The church has the catechisms, papal proclamations, all that. But there's something nice about the idea that these rulings came from people and not one person. Or God, for that matter.

"Do you have enough branches for that? I can go get some more if you need, our house is kind of near the woods."

[tehilim127_1]

"Honestly, I like that aspect a lot myself. Even when I argue with some of the rulings. Which is pretty often."

(Ask her about mustard on Passover sometime.)

"I haven't got the branches yet, I'm doing that last. Do you know what kind of trees you've got out that way? I like evergreens for this if I can't get bamboo."

[saltwaterlungs]

Darcy snorts in sympathy. If the Pope knew the extent of what Darcy believed, he would probably be excommunicated, along with half the Catholics he's ever met.

At the question though, they freeze up a little-

"Uh," 'trees' is not a helpful answer, nor is 'green ones', "I think some of them are evergreens? Maybe?"

It's been a long, long few years since they had to do anything relating to biology or nature shit, and Darcy zones out a bit whenever Phil starts talking about it.

[tehilim127_1]

Zivia waves a hand. "Don't worry about it, I've got lots of options, I'll figure something out. It can be any kind of trees, or even plants that aren't trees, so long as it stays up."

[saltwaterlungs]

"Oh. Then yeah, we have plenty of just like. Normal trees."

A momentary glance in the rough direction of home as if just to check the trees are still there, then back to Zivia.

"Hey-" he starts, not really sure how to broach it delicately, "you kind of gave me a weird look when I mentioned I was dead at that drinking thing. What's up with that? Is- I was about to ask if it was a religious thing but I think basically all of them don't like dead people being alive again unless it's a big deal, so like, forget I asked."

[tehilim127_1]

"What? Oh, no, nothing like that -- far as I know my religion doesn't have any problem with that, it's just against communicating with the dead for divinatory purposes. And I don't think it counts if the dead in question are, like, up and talking the same way as the living."

A pause. "Sorry about the weird look though. I think I was just sort of ... automatically unhappy about someone being dead."

[saltwaterlungs]

"I definitely can't give winning lottery numbers," Darcy half-heartedly jokes.

A small nod.

"It wasn't like, fun or anything. But it was years ago now. I'm more or less fine. Like- still definitely dead, but it just... is that, now. I stopped being sad about it mostly when it turned out I got ghost powers from it."

[tehilim127_1]

A considering pause.

"You know, I think I get that. A little bit."

[saltwaterlungs]

Flatly,

"If you're also dead, you don't look it."

[tehilim127_1]

"Not the dead part, no."

(Although the fact that they've all been told they are dead, here -- dead or near to it -- is one that comes back to her every so often. She doesn't bring it up just now.)

"But something that's sad until it just sort of turns into how things are. And how maybe it helps that happen when something good comes out of it."

[saltwaterlungs]

"Did you lose someone?" the psychopomp makes an educated guess. It's more likely than not.

"I mean- obviously you don't have to talk about it if you did or anything."

[tehilim127_1]

"Yeah." Steadily, even with a small smile. "Couple someones, over the years. It's all right, I don't mind talking about it in general terms."

[saltwaterlungs]

A small nod.

"Ehn- that was part of the work back home. Being there for the mourners, I mean. It's another part of taking care of the dead. I'm shit at it, but."

He just kind of gestures.

"I am, at least, okay at listening. What was the... good part that came out of it?"

[tehilim127_1]

"Well," and she tilts her head side to side for a moment in a weighing gesture, as though considering various losses and benefits. "Some of the best people I know, and in some ways kind of the whole life I have back home? I only ever encountered in the first place because my uncle Asher passed. I mean, if he hadn't, it might have happened someday in a different way -- but that's how it happened and it's hard to be sorry for that."

[saltwaterlungs]

"I think that's just how it always goes," Darcy muses, sounding much older than his age, "things just kind of happen and you deal with it. What's that ehn- man proposes, God disposes."

A quiet huff in thought.

"If I hadn't died back home I'd probably have like... properly died from some of the shit I've been through. An old friend told me once, you go through enough things and you get a spine of steel, like nothing can really bend you that way anymore."

[tehilim127_1]

Zivia nods, with a rueful smile. "Mann tracht un Gott lacht, is what they say in Yiddish. Man plans and God laughs. Sounds better when it rhymes."

The rest of it gets another nod. "Yeah, that's ... I've seen that. Whether it's getting too hard to be moved, or really good at bending and then springing right back, or ... whatever you did to get through bad shit the first time, you get better at it for next time."

[saltwaterlungs]

"Most things do," Darcy notes.

He doesn't feel like he's gotten better at handling bad shit. But maybe that's just relative. This place has all been... real life adult shit. Maybe there's just no end to what he'll have to adapt to.

He finally actually gnaws on the cookie in thought, then notes-

"Oh, shit, this are really good- these aren't Max's, are they?"