And the saddest, too. The more thoroughly I learned this- through living day on day with Dora-the happier I was and the more I ached in one corner of my mind with certain knowledge that this could be only a brief time too soon over-and when it was over, I did not marry again for almost a hundred years. Then I did, for Dora taught me to face up to death, too. She was as aware of her own death of the certain briefness of her life, as I was. But she taught me to live now, not to let anything sully today... until at last I got over the sadness of being condemned to live.
We had a wonderfully good time! Working our arses off, always too much to do, and enjoying every minute. Never too rushed to enjoy life no matter what. Sometimes just pat-ass and squeeze-titty as I hurried through the kitchen, with her quick smile acknowledging it, sometimes a lazy hour on the roof invested in watching sunset and stars and moons, usually with "Eros" to make, it sweeter.
I guess you could say that sex was, our only active amusement for a number of years (and never stopped being in first place as Dora was as enthusiastic at seventy as at seventeen- just not as limber). I was usually too tired to play good chess even though I made us a set of chessmen; we had no other games and probably would not have played them anyhow- too busy. Oh, we did do other things; often one of us would read aloud while the other knitted or cooked or something. Or we would sing together, coonjining the rhythm while we pitched grain or manure.
We worked together as much as possible; division of labor came only from natural limits. I can't bear a baby pr suckle it, but I can do anything else for a child. Dora could not do some things that I did because they were too heavy for her, especially when she was far gone in pregnancy. She had more talent for cooking than I (I had centuries more experience but not her touch), and she could cook while she took care of a baby and tended the smallest children, ones too small to join me in the fields. But I did cook, especially breakfast while she got the kids organized, and she did help work the farm and especially the truck garden. She knew nothing of farming; she learned.
Nor did she know construction-she learned. While I did most of the high work, she made most of the adobe bricks, always with the right amount of straw. Adobe was not well suited to the climate-too much rain and it can be discouraging to see a wall start to melt because an unexpected rain has caught you before you've topped it.
But you build from what you have, and it helped that I had the tops from the wagons to peg against the most exposed walls, until I worked out a way to waterproof an adobe wall. I did not consider a log cabin; good timber was too far away. It took the mules and me a full day to bring in two logs, which made them too expensive for most construction. Instead, I made do with smaller stuff that grew along the banks of Buck's River and dragged in logs only for beams.
Nor did I want to build a house that was not as near fireproof as I could make it. Baby Dora had once almost been burned to death; I would not risk it again for Dora, or for her children.
But how to make a roof both watertight and fireproof nearly stumped me.
I walked past the answer hundreds of times before I recognized it. When wind and weather and rot and lopers and insects have done their worst on a dead dragon, what is left is almost indestructible. I discovered this when I tried to burn what was left of a big brute that was unpleasantly close to our compound; I never did find out why this was so. Perhaps the biochemistry of those dragons has been investigated since then, but I had neither equipment nor time nor interest; I was too busy scratching a living for my family and was simply delighted to learn that it was true. Belly hide I cut into fireproof, waterproof tarpaulins; back and sides made excellent roofing. Later I found many uses for the bones.
We both taught, school, indoors and out. Perhaps our kids had a weird education...but a girl who can shape a comfortable and handsome saddle starting with a dead mule and not much else, solve quadratics in her head, shoot straight with gun or arrow, cook an omelet that is light and tasty, spout page after page of Shakespeare, butcher a hog and cure it can't be called ignorant by New Beginnings standards. All our girls and boys could do all of that and more. I must admit that they spoke a rather florid brand of English, especially after they set up the New Globe Theater and worked straight through every one of old Bill's plays. No doubt this gave them odd notions of Old Earth's culture and history, but I could not see that it hurt them. We had only a few bound books, mostly reference; the dozen-odd "fun" books were worked to death.
Our kids saw nothing strange in learning to read from As You Like it. No one told them that it was too hard for them, and they ate it up, finding "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing."
Although it did sound odd to hear a five-year-old girl speak in scansion and rolling periods, polysyllables falling gracefully from her baby lips. Still, I preferred it to "Run, Spot, run. See Spot run" from a later era than Bill's.
Second only to Shakespeare in popularity, and first whenever, Dora was swelling up again, were my medical books, especially those on anatomy, obstetrics, and gynecology. Any birth was an event-kittens, piglets, foals, puppies, kids-but a new baby out of Dora was a super-event, one that always put more thumbprints on that standard OB illustration, a cross section of mother and baby at term. I finally removed that one and several plates that followed it, those showing normal delivery, and posted them, to save wear and tear on my books- then announced that they could look at those pictures all they wanted to, but that to touch one was a spanking offense- then was forced to spank Iseult to keep justice even, which hurt her old father far more than it did her baby bottom even though she saved my face by applauding my gentle paddling with loud screams and tears.
My medical books had one odd effect. Our kids knew from babyhood all the correct English monosyllables for human anatomy and function; Helen Mayberry had never used slang with Baby Dora; Dora spoke as correctly in front of her children. But, once they could read my books, intellectual snobbery set in; they loved those Latin polysyllables. If I said "womb" (as I always did), some six-year-old would inform me with quiet authority that the book said "uterus." Or Undine might rush in with the news that Big Billy Whiskers was "copulating" with Silky, whereupon the kids would rush out to the goat pen to watch. Somewhere around their middle teens they usually recovered from this nonsense and went back to speaking English as their parents spoke it, so I guess it didn't hurt them.
The reason my own goatiness was not a spectator sport for children that all the animals afforded was, I think, only my own unreasoned but long-standing habits. I don't think it would have fretted Dora because it did not seem to fret her' the times it happened-as it did; privacy was scarce and got scarcer until I got our big house built some twelve or thirteen years after we entered the valley-time indefinite because for years I worked on it when I could; then we moved into it unfinished because we were bulging the walls of our first house and another baby (Ginny) was on the way.
Dora was untroubled by lack of privacy because her sweet lechery was utterly innocent, whereas mine was scarred by the culture I grew up in-a culture psychotic throughout and especially on this subject. Dora did much to heal those scars. But I never achieved her angelic innocence.