In Chapter 2, Kira thinks about what to do, now that she knows the women of the village want her gone. She decides to return to her mother’s cott and begin to rebuild it, in the hope that seeing her at work will convince the women to let her stay. As Kira approaches her mother’s cott, she realizes that she’s very hungry. Nothing remains of the cott except black ashes and a small garden. She’s surprised to see a woman picking carrots from the garden, and yells at the woman to stop.
Kira sees a pile of wood near her cott, and as she picks up a sapling, Vandara emerges from a nearby clearing where she’s been watching Kira. Kira doesn’t know if Vandara has a “hubby” or children, but she knows that Vandara is respected, or feared, in the village. She’s tall and strong, with a long scar that she’s said to have gotten from a fight with a forest “beast.” Vandara tells Kira that she’s lost her space; it belongs to the women now. Kira insists that the space is still her property. She reminds Vandara that it belonged to her father and her mother before her. Other women come out of their nearby cotts and tell Kira that they need the space to build a pen for tykes. Vandara tells Kira that she’s worthless because of her lame leg, and that she should have stayed in the Field with her dead mother. Kira notices that some of the women are carrying rocks. If even one of them throws a rock at her, the others will follow suit. While being thrown rocks at, Kira then thinks of what her father and mother would do. Kira doesn’t know if the Council of Guardians will let her live in the village or not. In the meantime, though, she decides to continue rebuilding her mother’s cott. She will go to Matthew, a carpenter and old friend of her mothers, and offer him her weaving in exchange for wood beams. She will also ask him for smaller pieces of wood, which she’ll use to build a threading frame. Kira has always been good with her hands, but in recent years, she’s become a creative, skillful weaver. She’s eager to continue with her weaving, assuming that she’s allowed to stay in the village.
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Chapter 1 of Gathering Blue, by Lois Lowry, opens with the main character, Kira, saying her final goodbye to her mother’s departing spirit going into heaven. Kira is in “the Field,” where the people of her village leave their dead to be scavenged by animals from the surrounding woods. Kira has sat with her mother’s body for the four days it takes her spirit to depart, and now she is returning to her village to figure out what to do. Her home has been burned so that the disease her mother died from will not spread. We learn that Kira herself was supposed to be left in the Field as a baby, having been born with a twisted leg, but that her mother, recently widowed, fought to keep her only child. On her way back from the Field, Kira meets her friend Matt, a boy from the “swampy, disagreeable Fen” who is “probably the child of a dragger or digger." She asks him for his help in building her new cott and offers to pay him by telling stories to him and his friends. Matt agrees but tells her that the women of the village, led by a woman named Vandara, intend to force Kira out, to fend for herself in the Field and the woods beyond.
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