The Afternoon Country -

     I lived on an island off the north coast of Wales for many years, the Isle of Anglesey, and it was an amazing experience. During those years, I did many of the things that are considered the most important things a woman can do with her life: I met a man, was courted by him, married him, made a home with him, gave him a son. I was a good friend to many, whether it was the local butcher (who gave us very nice scraps for our dogs) or kind to the local Irish gypsies that trundled by our cottage twice a year offering to sharpen our knives (in exchange for a hot meal for their children). I kept a garden that gave us some terrific things for our own kitchen but also gave me some goodies to trade with others. I also got involved with fundraising for a local charity, an organization that helped disabled Veterans. I knitted and crocheted baby things for the hospital, and so much enjoyed that. I joined the local middle class (which meant I bought a used car for myself) and gave people rides when I saw them walking along the road in the rain, and it rained nearly every day on that island. I made a wreath for my church every Sunday, which hung on the visiting vicars podium, and scented that musty damp alter area with some nice flowers and herbs from my garden. I made donations of baked goods for the school fundraiser, even though I didn't have any children of school age. I supported the rugby club by putting coins in the collection boxes that were on the bar at the local pub we frequented when we went out to have a pint and catch the local gossip. I placed evergreen wreaths at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day for Welsh Veterans of all wars anywhere. I did the best I could to minimize the amount of garbage I made that would be put into the local landfill. I didn't pollute the local streams by dumping fireplace ashes into them, but traded them with local builders who used those ashes to make pathways for tourists at historic places on the island. Those builders helped me fix the sagging roof line on the cottage I lived in, which was built three years before the Declaration of Independence. I put up bird feeders in my garden area, and my husband built me a stone bench where I would sit under the sycamore tree and watch in total delight. I could hear the coo-coo while sitting on that bench, which is a magical sound in the fall. In the spring I put out pans of bread and milk for the hedgehogs who would bring in their broods of young ones (the Welsh were very keen on supporting the local hedgehog populations, wherever they may be found).

     I did these many things for outward appearances. What I did for my inward life was to read, read, read and to write, write, write. I read anything and everything I could get my hands on. I wrote short stories, poems and essays. I also got a few articles published in women's magazines that had themes about rural life. It concerned me that I had become a "magazine writer" and that the language I used would be considered "women's magazine language", but the money I brought in, although very little in the eyes of a New York writer wanna-be, was enough to keep animal protein in our daily diet and helped us be hospitable neighbors and friends and members of society. My husband brought in very little cash money but often took things in as trade, such as a raw fleece from one of his bosses prize-winning Jacob's sheep. I learned how to clean the fleece, card the raw wool, spin it on a spinning wheel, and all because of that beautiful fleece I learned a group of craft activities I'd always wanted to learn about, plus I sold it for good money. I never got to weave it or knit with it, because as soon as I had it in the form of yarn, I started getting offers for it from crafters. Those were impossibly good offers and I sold that yarn as fast as it was ready to work with.

     I loved being able to live that kind of country rural life. I was not raised that way, but read many many stories about living that way. It was a marvelous bonus to have a real, true life experience that resembled so well, a lifestyle I had read about and admired. That fed my soul like nothing else ever had.

     But it was an idyll. A fantasy. A construct.  It was not built on a firm foundation. It was built on dreams.

     We owed no one any money. We owned the cottage outright. We had several ways to heat the cottage and bring light into it when we needed it. We never went out for a restaurant meal because, well, there were no restaurants on the island we lived on. We went to the pub every weekend and they served food, but we didn't go there to eat microwaved lasagne. We went there to drink the gorgeous brown Welsh beer and chat with friends and hear all the news and gossip about the island folk. We paid very little taxes because we earned very little cash to be taxed. Our lives were not based on cash - they were, rather, based on consumables,  and we grew or cultivated or in some other way produced them ourselves (as much as possible) and then either traded or sold those things. Yes, there were things we could not grow or produce ourselves, like salt or pepper or guitar strings or paper or typewriter ribbons or some of the chemicals we needed to make things work better (i.e. lube the car or the tractor, fertilizer for the garden, cleaners for the house etc) and for those we needed to pay cash. We were truly "Smallholders" (or were certainly trying to be!) and we earned our living from our land, from our garden, and from our animals. The government didn't like that kind of lifestyle very much at all. They could not find a way to tax one Jacob's Ram Fleece weighing 8 pounds before combing, or the half a lamb carcass my husband occasionally brought home from his employer, or the funky scratched-up pianola he found at the dump one day. I cleaned that pianola, tuned it, put it in the sitting room and played the hell out of it with much glee and good gladness because it cost us nothing and gave us great entertainment. Our Welsh friends thought that was a tremendous victory against the English. The British government thought that was a good reason to raise our yearly rates, which is pretty much the same at property taxes here in the good ole US of A. We were paying the same rates as a fellow on the mainland, who had a fine 6 bedroom, 4 bath mansion with an indoor jacuzzi and weight room as well as 50 acres under cultivation with alfalfa (which was pre-sold to an English  horse breeding conglomerate that was mostly financed by some wealthy people in Saudi Arabia who liked Welsh-bred English trotting horses). Our cottage had two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, an outhouse (no indoor toilet), a small 19th Century range that heated 5 gallons of water at a time, cooked a medium sized stew and dried some clothes place in front of it overnight, and that was about all it could do. Yes, it was a terrific lifestyle with no debts, lots of personal freedom but it was fragile and soon-to-be impossible to sustain. The government was gonna win that battle, for sure.

     We left the island before that happened. In fact, we sold everything we owned, including the cottage, packed  a few things, bundled up our Welsh-borne baby son and boarded a plane for the west coast of America. We thought we had enough money to start over in California. We were wrong. When we got there, we found out we barely had enough to last 6 months if we lived with relatives. We stayed with my mother for those first 6 months, while my husband searched for and finally found a job, which paid him very little money for the amount of labor they got out of him. We found a tiny, dingy studio apartment we could barely afford. We had very little furniture. Everything was from thrift stores and dumpster diving. We managed, somehow. We ached for our home back in Wales. We ached for our cottage. I yearned for my own garden again. My husband longed to be out in the fields with the sheep. We feared that our son would never know the pleasures (and challenges) of rural life, and we regretted that so much.

    We have our memories. We live on those when things get too rough.  God gave us memories that we might have roses in December, the Irish gypsies used to say. Those memories are most easy to reflect upon in the afternoons, because that was when the work and worry of our days would start to wind down. Friends would come buy for a cup of tea. The mail would be delivered. The work in the garden would have to stop because it would rain for a while. It would be time soon to draw the curtains, turn on the radio for the news, set the table for supper, stir up the fire, and head for the kitchen to have a look at the lamb stew in the crock pot. Puddles The Kat would come home from a hard days rodent patrol. The afternoons were for doing those little jobs, errands, minor tasks that every household needs done every day. Taking out trash. Shaking carpets. Bringing in a load of wood for the fire. Checking on laundry, like towels and sheets, that have been hanging out to dry all day. The afternoons were for reconnecting with the world but also for preparing for the lovely disconnect of bedtime.

     In that country lifestyle, in that Afternoon Country, the afternoon was for looking clear eyed at Life.