wherein Liz is mistaken for a bad mother

As I walked home from work this evening, I passed a small girl on a bicycle and her mother who was walking behind her -- or, more accurately, I passed the mother and then the girl and I played leapfrog for a couple blocks.

Near the end of the second block, the mother stopped to talk to someone and the girl, naturally, stopped at the intersection. I crossed it just as a car pulled up on the sidestreet that had a stop sign.

As I reached the other side, a woman's voice said, loudly, "Hey! You! Is that your daughter?"

Since I have no children, it didn't occur to me that I was being addressed.

The woman called again. "Hey! You shouldn't walk ahead of her like that. It isn't safe!"

At this point I turned, wondering what was going on, and discovered a woman leaning out the driver's seat window of the car on the sidestreet to give me a disapproving look.

Apparently the girl's mother was far enough back from the sidestreet, and sufficiently obscured by the shade of trees, that since I had been next to the girl before she stopped her bike, the driver assumed I was the girl's mother.

"She's not mine," I said, and pointed across the street. "Her mother's back there."

"You need to pay attention to her -- it's dangerous not to," the driver said firmly.

"Not my kid! Her mother's back there, talking to someone," I repeated. And I turned around and continued home.

...

On the one hand, it's reassuring to know that people are civic-minded enough to keep an eye out for children in potentially unsafe situations, but on the other hand, it was an extremely odd experience to be scolded for bad parenting when I don't have any kids.

...

I keep forgetting that I'm technically old enough to have a ten-year-old kid, if I had, for goodness only knows what reason, gotten pregnant right out of high school.

[Fic] "Heirlooms" -- original story, Elsewhere

The Apple and Daphne Rumluck who feature in Secrets as OC yearmates of Ginny Weasley were not originally created for that story. They are transplants (with alterations, obviously) from a world I created in my teens, with occasional help from Vicky. In that world, Apple is the heir to Ivy House and the northern third of Elsewhere proper (one of the four mountain valleys that make up the tiny country of Elsewhere -- the other three being Nowhere, Eastwick, and Southward). Daphne is still Apple's second cousin, but she is also related to the Turnagain family, who rule Nowhere from Briar House.

Apple has a slightly awkward relationship with Blue Turnagain, one of Daphne's cousins, which you can read about in the ficlet Apple & Blue. Blue does not feature in the following ficlet, however, which tells the story of a single incident from one of Apple and Daphne's childhood visits to Briar House. I think Apple is thirteen and Daphne twelve in this story. Therefore, Frost is fourteen, Coin is twelve, and Moon is eleven. Moon is Blue's little sister. ...Actually, given those ages, this is most likely set only a week or so before Blue announces that he's leaving home to see the world.

But anyway. On to the story! (700 words)

( Heirlooms )

---------------------------------------------

Someday I really must get around to writing the story in which Apple and Blue, and Daphne and some as-yet-unknown characters sort out a political plot in Meriwhen and Elsewhere, with all the complications of having to piece the thing together from two ends and then wait four or five days for letters to travel from Candlewick (the capital of Elsewhere) to Myria (the capital of Meriwhen). But not now.