Something occurred to me on this reread that I haven’t thought of before. While I would never dream of suggesting that Katniss led a “comfortable” life before her father died, I can’t help noting that she grew up with a world of advantages not shared by her Seam neighbors (or even some of the merchants!), and it’s interesting when you start to pull it all together.
Her father was a skilled (maybe expert) hunter and forager, so she certainly ate better than the rest of the Seam (especially that all-precious protein - including fresh fish for brain and vision health - as well as fruit, wild greens, nuts). Her mother was a trained apothecary/herbalist, so she had some of the best available medical care (Since no one can afford doctors, apothecaries are our healers - p.8) under her own roof for injuries and illnesses, and her mother probably taught her good hygiene practices from the start.
Her mother knew the herbs to use for everything and her father could and would go beyond the fence to retrieve them. However Mrs. Everdeen ended things with her parents, she still ended up with their priceless handwritten materia medica.
Aaaaaaand, now I need a Jack/Alys/Raisa Rapunzel retelling where pregnant Alys desperately wants her katniss tubers (actually, didn’t I tease that much in an aside in WtM a loooooong time ago??) and Raisa is the unloved witch with three little sons and no daughter/no hopes of having one. Jack adamantly refuses to give up their baby but desperate, miserable third-trimester Alys is willing to broker any deal (heck, maybe witch!Raisa even shows up to serve as midwife because Alys is struggling). Raisa disappears with Katniss, and Jack, assuming the worst, goes to the ends of the earth in search of his daughter, only to find her her cherished and adored by her stepmama in Milk-Daughter fashion…
Katniss’s father took her to the woods, occasionally giving her lungs a reprieve from the sooty air of Twelve, and gave her expert survival instruction that would have served her well even if she’d never gone to the Games. He taught her to swim - something I doubt anyone else in Twelve had the opportunity to learn, let alone practice (unless they were sneaking off to the woods as well) - a very beneficial form of exercise for her little body, and to climb trees.
She mentions that both her parents sang (though we know less about her mother’s voice than her father’s). Believe it or not, there was once music in my house. Music that I helped make. My father pulled me in with that remarkable voice… (p. 234) That voice was, in my humble opinion, the nearest thing Twelve had to real magic. …whenever my father sang, all the birds in the area would fall silent and listen. His voice was that beautiful, high and clear and so filled with life it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. (p. 43) And we know this isn’t just Katniss idealizing his memory because we get almost a verbatim account in Mr. Mellark’s “Because when he sings…even the birds stop to listen” (p.300). This may be more of a personal headcanon, but I’m willing to bet her father filled that house with breathtaking tales as well as songs.
She knew what velvet was - granted, from a small sample on the collar of one of her mother’s dresses, but it’s a unique little snippet of luxury for a Seam child to have been exposed to. (This always brings back a fond memory from my own childhood: my mother had a “Sunday sweater” with narrow white stripes of angora every couple of inches, which I loved to trace with a fingertip when I was in her lap.) And as far as I can tell, Katniss had a (largely) stay-at-home mother, since Mrs. Everdeen was “expected to get a job” (p. 26) within a month of her husband’s death - not that she couldn’t have been running her Seam apothecary business before Mr. Everdeen died, but she definitely wasn’t on a time clock and was probably/primarily working from home, which certainly benefited the girls more than having both parents gone for up to twelve hours a day.
Those parents had a tender, loving relationship, and as Katniss remarks in the bread flashback, My parents never hit us. I couldn’t even imagine it. (p. 31) This topic is worth an entire post of its own. I suspect that hitting one’s children in Twelve was a fairly (sadly) common practice, but it’s so foreign to eleven-year-old Katniss that she can’t even imagine it.
As I said earlier, I would never begin to describe Katniss’s childhood as luxurious, but until her father’s death, I’m inclined to think she led a much nicer life than a lot of her fellow district citizens. Thoughts?
After some deep thought about discrepancies in my Sunghoon as a Scorpio Rising theory, I decided to explore the possibility of him having another Ascendant. After some different layouts, I think this one seems to make more sense than my original speculation!
