no one will ever know, open.

[rowan elliot]

Every trip Rowan made up to the owlry was, without fail, a nightmare. She tried to go every other week but as the letters from her various family members flowed in, it became harder and harder to write replies to them all in a timely matter. It was entirely possible that she could have gone and sent them off as she wrote them but the school's owlry was far from her favourite place and she tried to limit the amount of time she spent there. The less shoes ruined by owl poo, the better. Another solution to her letter problem was getting an owl of her own but yet again Rowan had hold-ups about that. Owls look upkeep, something she wasn't willing to give to an animals she didn't even really want. Plus, she already had her cat Amelia and her roommate's owl made the dorm already full with animals. Any more and it was entirely possible that Rowan would go insane.

All this led to Rowan having to make the trek to the owlry with eight thick letters stuck under her arm with three more in her dorm that were half-written. She would have waited until those were ready to be sent off only her mother had sent a third letter yesterday asking about when she would hear from Rowan and it'd guilted her enough to take time after class to the send the ones that were good to go off. Rowan wasn't particularly fond of writing letters, had it been up to her she would have kept to herself the whole school year. Only, she knew how her mother worried tirelessly about her ten children and she felt bad only adding to it when there were others who were much more troublesome. And then there were her siblings that she did get along with: Balsam who wanted photographs of all her favourite places when she'd been there only last year, Aspen and news on the new baby Edith, sickly Willow whom no one thought would live much longer.

She tried to remind herself of why all these reasons were very important as she approached the entry to the owlry and could smell the stench of the animals even through the door. It wasn't that the owlry wasn't kept clean, moreso that Rowan had delicate senses and the slightest unpleasant smells brough tears of irritation to her eyes. So it is easy to imagine how much Rowan dreaded walking in to the owlry. She stood in front of the closed door for more moments than she'd like to admit before finally building up enough courage to push open the wooden door. As soon as she did so, she regretted it. It was loud, it was smelly and the birds flying about overhead only served to give her a headache but she might as well get it over with - she had homework to attend to after this. Grumbling, she carefully handed each of her letters to the first owl she could get a hold of. She knew very little about owls and thus, did not particularly care which kind would be carry her letters.

Watching an owl fly off with the last of her letters she felt relieved - there the task was done, she could leave now.