[Mithalwen]

Mithalwen lingered outside a long while. She had seen the invitation sometime ago but she had never been a party person and this tendency had strengthened over the years. She had grown more like her name greyer and more treelike in temperament as well as physically. She was definitely not as bendable - “and increasing in circumference year on year” piped up a voice in her head. Her mind’s eye gave her inner voice what her mother would have called an old-fashioned look and the voice bit its tongue.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love the place, she did. it had been a refuge for years but she had another refuge now, a home she need never leave on the blessed island and there were things in the other world which took her time and occupied her mind. She had taken a stop gap job on moving and just when she had planned to move on she found herself a key worker in the struggle against the pestilence. She was working for the victuallers and as a wise hobbit once said “where there’s life there’s need of vittles”.. She couldn’t save your life but she knew where wine and the requisites for the privies were kept... Spending all day answering queries and soothing the irate left her almost grateful for social distancing.

But yet there were people it would be good to see again, those of whom no word reached her in the other place. So she loitered outside and watched others enter, some the firstcomers she knew little, some of her own time, some of The bright younglings grown very well indeed. Inner voice and another that sounded rather like Lalaith’s chivvied her on. She wrapped herself in her shadowy cloak, washed her hands carefully While she hummed the first stanza of “Gil-galad was an Elven king” and slipped in as unobtrusively as she could contrive.