Claudia couldn't help being relieved when it was time to get out of Rome, and the Empire. It was hard to be the nonentity society mostly wanted her to be, to keep her head down and accept cuffs and reprimands without retaliation. The only joy had been her position at the foundry, making trinkets with skills she had to learn carefully to avoid making too many mistakes.
It was also a relief to be somewhere that the language was natural to her, something she understood and spoke fluently. Learning to manage a household was something else entirely. She'd never really thought about how complicated it could be to warm a building with fires or cook on them. Cleaning, well, the dirt floor was packed, but those rushes...that was new and utterly alien to her. Some of the dogs took care of the vermin that tried to come inside and make homes among them, at least. It was a long way from what she might have seen on History Channel, but she would manage, somehow.
Mending and sewing was turning out to be a lot harder. She'd already been jokingly banished from the looms because her weaving lacked the speed or skill of the other women. They accepted her as an equal on a lot of things, because she had their god's favor, but teasing was quite common as she showed few matronly arts. It was much easier to spend part of her day making beads and other small decorative items to exchange for services she hadn't yet mastered, although she didn't dare stop trying to learn.
And then in the evenings the tables where brought out to have a communal meal and handle any conflicts that might have come up during the day, or visitors, or whatever. She could almost see herself fitting in here, on some level, although she knew she'd always be the outlander to them.
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It was also a relief to be somewhere that the language was natural to her, something she understood and spoke fluently. Learning to manage a household was something else entirely. She'd never really thought about how complicated it could be to warm a building with fires or cook on them. Cleaning, well, the dirt floor was packed, but those rushes...that was new and utterly alien to her. Some of the dogs took care of the vermin that tried to come inside and make homes among them, at least. It was a long way from what she might have seen on History Channel, but she would manage, somehow.
Mending and sewing was turning out to be a lot harder. She'd already been jokingly banished from the looms because her weaving lacked the speed or skill of the other women. They accepted her as an equal on a lot of things, because she had their god's favor, but teasing was quite common as she showed few matronly arts. It was much easier to spend part of her day making beads and other small decorative items to exchange for services she hadn't yet mastered, although she didn't dare stop trying to learn.
And then in the evenings the tables where brought out to have a communal meal and handle any conflicts that might have come up during the day, or visitors, or whatever. She could almost see herself fitting in here, on some level, although she knew she'd always be the outlander to them.