A Bigger Village

After spending 4 years in a small, remote village, it has been interesting and actually rather pleasant to explore the benefits of a market town. Monmouth, the town where I live now, has a population of about 9,000 people as opposed to the Cumbrian village of St Bees where I used to live, which has a population of two thousand. It's amazing how much difference 7,000 people make! St Bees has four pubs, a restaurant, a village post office shop, a small library, and a café. Monmouth has a high street with dozens of shops, including several high street chains, coffee shops, and independent boutiques. It has a cinema, a theatre, several doctors' surgeries, a museum, a large library, a weekly market, a town hall...

Church Street in Monmouth

Well, I could go on and on but I won't. You get the picture! The funny thing is, Monmouth sometimes feels as much of a village as St Bees did. I generally see at least one person I know when I go into town, which is especially amazing considering how few people I know so far. I can walk into the countryside in less than ten minutes, which is especially handy when you have a dog.

Vauxhall Fields with a view of Monmouth

Of course there are some downsides. At night the town centre can feel... not dangerous, precisely, but less than savoury on occasion. There is traffic and traffic noise. And while I see people I know, there are a lot of people I don't know. You generally don't greet people you don't know on the street, something that was commonplace in St Bees (My husband seems yet to realize this). All in all, though, the size of a market town feels nice to me. Busy but not too busy. Neither too small nor too big. We'll see how I continue to adjust...

Misty Morning

Yesterday was one of those gorgeous, golden autumn days of warm weather and blue skies and leaves drifting lazily down. Today was the complete opposite: a melancholy mist obscuring just about everything, and the only sound on my walk the raucous cry of a rook or the mournful bleat of a sheep. Yet there is something beautiful about a day like today, and it suited my mood…

The Silence is Broken

Forgive me, readers, for the long silence on this blog. Life is starting to settle down just a little bit, after much turmoil, tumult, and tiredness! We moved from St Bees, Cumbria, on July 29, and then promptly went to Canada for three weeks to visit my family. Then back to our new house, new village, new life, all of us blinking in stunned surprise at where we'd landed. A few weeks on the boxes are mostly unpacked save for those pesky few that we'll probably cart, unpacked, to our next house. They're filled with a variety of odds and ends--spare batteries, paint brushes, an old scarf--that there seems to be no place or use for but I am reluctant to throw them out.

It's been hard to move this time, and we are, alas, Champion Movers. But we didn't want to move here; we didn't want to leave Cumbria. And so 'settling in' has taken on a whole new meaning.

The village we landed in is lovely, though, like something out of a Miss Marple adaptation. Roses round every cottage door, lovely footpaths through rolling fields, and we are living right next to the church (again!) so every Wednesday night we hear the peal of bells as the bell ringers practice their craft.

People, for the most part, have been friendly, although it can be tiring to have the same conversations over and over again. And while acquaintances are made in a day, friends take a little longer.  But we persevere. Every so often I pause, breathless with surprise that we are actually here. That we actually left Cumbria. And then I try to move on.

So prepare yourself for a new village life! I'm not the vicar's wife but merely an ordinary resident (as if I wasn't before!!) and I am still writing, still trying to mother five children and keep my head above water. Stay tuned for my further adventures in the Cotswolds…

Another village life

As I mentioned in my last post, it has been a very tumultuous month, with many ups and downs, and much (too much!) emotion. But at least one thing is settled; my husband has found a job and we will be exchanging a Cumbrian life for a Cotswoldian (is that even a word?) one.

It feels very odd and unsettling to contemplate moving. We came here four years ago intending to stay for decades, hopefully until my husband's retirement. It felt wonderful, like sinking into a hot bubble bath, to know you didn't have to move. To consider the next few years and be able to build into people, places, institutions and ideas, knowing you would be there to see things through.

In what felt like a moment all that comfort and security was gone, which I suppose shows me how fleeting and temporal this life really is. That notion has been brought home to me by my father's illness as well. How is it that one moment you can feel as if life stretches before you in an endless golden line of days, and in the next it feels as if it has been all snatched and scattered?

Well, back to the good news, or goodish news. We are moving to the Cotswolds, near Oxford. I'm not exactly sure what village we'll be living in, as we are still looking for a house to rent. But I suspect it will look something like this:

And yet I shall miss our village's steeply winding street, the glorious view of the fells and sea, even the bitter wind! I shall miss everything here, because I came here expecting to stay and now have discovered I can't.

But life is funny that way. Our ways are not God's ways, and I trust that He knows what He is doing in this as in all things. But it still feels hard and disappointing now, even though I am grateful that we have somewhere to go. And so my Cumbrian life will become my Cotswold life. I don't think I shall change the name of my blog, but watch this space for the further adventures of a village life!