A working orchard and vineyard, far from the palace, where Laertes has gone to wait out his own grief. He left the palace when his wife died and his son did not return. Now he tends vines and trees with his own hands, dressed in a servant’s clothes, refusing to be comforted. In winter he sleeps inside near the fire on the bare floor. In summer he sleeps outside on fallen leaves. He has stripped his life down to the simplest possible motions: dig, prune, water, sleep, wait. [SPOILER: When Odysseus finally goes to find him, he comes as a stranger first, telling a Cretan tale about meeting a man named Odysseus in a foreign court. He watches his father break. The spade falls from Laertes’s hands. Then he shows the boar scar above his knee and says his name. The transformation in Laertes’s face is like watching the sun come up. Athena touches him and the weakness falls away; in the very next chapter he throws a spear that takes Eupeithes through the breastplate. Three generations stand in the vineyard at last, and the farmstead becomes the place where the family is whole again, briefly, before the avenging fathers come.]
Laertes's Farmstead / Vineyard
A small farm in the hills where Odysseus's father has self-exiled. He sleeps on the floor in winter, in the dirt of his vineyard in summer.