Free Our Picnics in the Sun by Morag Joss Page B

after winter of rain and fog. Set against all that were the things we overestimated: our own skill, certainly, our power to learn from our mistakes, and, ultimately, our resilience to the drudgery of it all.
    We seldom managed more than short bursts of energy or success at anything and so after a while we came to expect bad luck, and then, of course, bad luck was what we got. A new hen came to us with bronchitis that spread and killed the whole flock (antibiotics were out of the question), and the flock after that we lost all in one night to a fox. Roof repairs one October were undone in November by the worst storm that anyone could remember. I managed to get some of my weaving into a decent craft shop in Honiton, which went bust without paying me. One year I discovered a profitable flair for making green tomato chutney that for some reason I couldn’t repeat; the two following years it turned out runny and bitter. And the one summer we managed to get enough bookings, mainly from Howard’s old London friends, to launch the Alternative Spiritual Retreat (four weeks of meditation, yoga, pottery, weaving, and whole-meal food) turned out to be also the summer Adam was teething. He roared the house down night and day. Somebody wrote “Alternative, all right, but not in the way I was looking for” in the Visitors’ Book.
    The year after the teething disaster Howard spent a lot of money on a Hindu mystic. He came from Portsmouth, which struck a false note with me from the start, and turned up with two young robed followers who also exacted a month’s bed and board from us. Only a handful of people attended the Stoneyridge Spirituality Summer School, advertised “with resident guru.” The year after that Howard introduced earth healing and crystal therapy, but bookings were down again. We had yet to turn a profit on the smallholding produce or on my weaving or Howard’s pots. After the following penniless winter we faced the necessity of opening the next year just for the holiday Bed and Breakfast trade, and although that brought us the custom, before the end of our first season I suspected that we weren’t naturally hospitable people at all. By then our mediocrity was an entrenched and settled thing, our attempts at self-sufficiency a doomed round of chores. But we went on trying, growing wormy vegetables among the encroaching gorse and ragwort, keeping and losing livestock, turning out rough cloth and pottery, and painting our rooms with murals in harsh, desperate colors. Adam grew.
    Now the vegetable plots we’d dug and redug stretched away from the far side of the house and down the hill, and with every year they retrenched a little, as more of the moor’s thorn and reeds crept across their broken borders and rooted themselves where once we’d planted lines of brassicas, beans, and chard. Sheep and deer and ponies still tried to trample the fences, and rabbits and moles colonized the soil. I’d sown some lettuce seed this year and put in a few tomatoes, but I would forget about them for days on end and come across them parched and wilting or gone to seed or eaten by invaders. The outside painting of the house never had been finished and the walls were strangely brindled where the newer patches of white were daubed against the old, unpainted pebbledash.
    I walked on and over the ridge to the far side of the hill, and picked the heather quickly, tearing it up because I’d forgotten to bring cutters. The flowering season on the moor was ending early because of the drought; I pulled out the scorched and dead brown sprigs from the rest of the bunch, and threw them away.
    When I got back to the ridge from where I could see the houseagain, I caught the glint of a silver car down on the narrow road. It slowed, then turned up our track. From there to the house took several minutes along nearly a mile of rough stones and ruts; even so, Adam would be at the house before I was. Though I knew it was pointless I waved and