Our homes were designed with much ceremony at the beginning of the Equi Awakening, roughly ten thousand years ago. They were built out of pure white Viridian Alabaster, which is the hardest stone on our planet, and the most common.  They are called an Equi Sunburst.  They have seven fins sweeping out from a central hub to represent the sun and its rays, which warms our planet and grows our crops.  They are very organic with their living roofs and slab sides, and if left in their natural element, they blend almost to invisibility among the boulders and trees.

While they are beautiful, they are also huge – nearly twenty thousand square feet – and in some ways the spaces are not very practical.  The rays come to a point, which makes the room at the end of each ray an odd shape, hard to arrange.  The rays are fairly narrow, only twenty-four feet, but they are eighty-eight feet long, which leads to some seemingly endless hallways, which my grandsire jokingly refers to as holler-ways.

The houses were built to hold several generations of a family back when families were considerably bigger than they are now, and designed so that each family unit had a private space. (Hence the rays.)  The family hearth is in the center of the house – the hub.  As time passed and families got smaller, the rays came to have specific designations.  One for boys and young unmarried men, one for girls and young unmarried women; two sets of parents, grandparents, and guests.  The seventh wing is the most important, and the most used and enjoyed – that is the kitchen wing.  The kitchen is cavernous. It has two cook stoves, a six foot long stove and a four foot long stove, two sinks, four baker’s ovens and an enormous family table where we take most of our meals.  When all the produce is rolling in to be canned, frozen, dried and otherwise preserved, every inch of that kitchen is alive with activity and every member of the family is busy.

Beyond the kitchen is the old baker’s pantry, which my dam uses for sorting and storing her garden seeds.  Next to that is the boot and coat room, so we don’t track mud and water into the house.  Further out yet is the “big” pantry, which also contains the cooling, cold and freezing boxes.  Beyond that is the men’s workroom and saddle shop.  The men spend many winter hours in there gathered around the friction fire repairing saddles and other tack, as well as garden tools.  Out at the very point is the laundry and garden prep room.  Its walls and part of its ceiling are glass, so it is bright even on the darkest winter days.  I will include some sketches soon, so you will have some idea what I’m talking about, but please do not critique my artwork.  My Uncle Ardenai is a talented artist, I am not.