Editing Sigil:The Uragh (section)

== Household and Family ==

The household is the enduring center of Uragh life. An Uragh yurt is not crude temporary shelter but a carefully designed portable home reflecting generations of experience with wind, cold, heat, rain, transport, ventilation, storage, and fire. Its interior may be richly appointed with woven hangings, furs and rugs, tools, bundles of herbs and spices, drying meats, cooking vessels, baskets, weapons, tack, clothing, charms, keepsakes, carved objects, and all the accumulated possessions of family life.

Everything must eventually move, but this encourages neither poverty nor austerity. It encourages judgment about what is worth carrying. Textiles may be extraordinarily elaborate, leather carefully tooled and dyed, and horn, bone, wood, hide, fiber, and traded metal shaped into objects both useful and beautiful. Jewelry, charms, braids, decorated tack, and patterned cloth allow families and individuals to display identity, affection, wealth, skill, and memory without constructing permanent monuments. A beautiful thing need not be nailed to the ground.

Households commonly include children, parents, elders, unmarried relatives, fosterlings, and others bound by kinship or obligation. Children grow up surrounded by adults performing useful work and learn largely by participating in it. A young child may begin by gathering fuel, carrying small objects, watching animals, or holding something while an increasingly impatient aunt repairs it; greater responsibilities follow as ability permits. Nomadic life provides little advantage in pretending to possess a skill one lacks. An Uragh who cannot perform a necessary task finds someone who can, because the alternative may mean losing livestock, ruining equipment, going hungry, or endangering the household.

Elders consequently retain importance long after physical strength begins to fade. Someone who remembers where a herd survived an exceptional winter, why an apparently excellent campsite has been avoided for thirty years, or what happened the last time a particular watercourse failed possesses knowledge with immediate practical value. The family is therefore not merely an economic arrangement or a chain of descent. It is a storehouse of experience carried from camp to camp.