From the outside looking in it’s all very romantic; the era, the aesthetic, the traditions and social cues and orderly courting etiquette. They always leave out the details, the raw bits that make it real, like you aren’t seeing through a glass darkly and only remembering the good parts.
Where is it written about the fickle light of a torch or an oil lamp? The weight of holding up layers of garments when running? The animals inside the keep for the winter getting into your food stores or eating the parchment you were working on? No one ever mentions that the red ink stains your fingers like blood every time you pen him a letter. Home alone is a battlefield all its own, much like the one he is away on.
I am becoming very much annoyed with the women in the papers writing about the “good old days” as though it were a fantastical holiday and not a struggle to maintain any sense of cleanliness or sanity or peace. Days and weeks and months spent waiting. Walking the halls and fields and grounds and woods searching for the site of him home at last. Even if only his ghost.
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