Potatoes now, cape later

Last time I spoke with my aunt (long plaits, vegetable garden, spinning wheel) she asked oh so casually, just checking in, whether I still thought moving out of the city was the right thing for us. Oh my gosh, yes, absolutely, no question, I vagued. I must have sounded like a politician on the defensive.

I haven't even weighed up the differences since the first few months. There's nothing to weigh - I am sitting here listening to birdsong and looking at the neighbours' hedge and if I turn my head, which I won't because I slept wrong, I can see both our small dogs asleep on two separate soft surfaces.

The younger one has only been with us three weeks; they're not cuddling each other to sleep yet but I have high hopes.

I live here because I fell in love with the garden and offered every penny I had access to. I'm growing potatoes and peas and tomatoes and verbena. I have my white hydrangeas that I used as a vision board shorthand for years. I'm going to cut an arch through the hedge that crosses the garden two-thirds of the way down. I've mown paths where I cross most often and I'm leaving most of the grass to grow thigh-high for the birdseed, same as last year. I've painted some of the walls, languidly, the paint can staying out for days in between Being In The Mood. I paid some professionals with kneeling pads and a van to take out the ancestral Axminster and put down vinyl, right before we brought the puppy home. That was godly timing, without going into detail.

I haven't changed a thing about the kitchen. The pantry shelves still have the same sticky-back-plastic covering they had for the previous elderly woman. We have different tastes in curtains but she made some fine choices. She liked her hooks, good woman. There are cup hooks of varying vintages in the insides of every cupboard door and on every strip of wooden trim.

We're selling sunshine. I can't be calm about how awesome it is to have solar panels, finally, after all these decades of knowing about them. I'm listening to infinite music powered by sunshine, and selling the spare.

Imagining myself back in those flats that suited my twenties gives me a full-body flinch. They were fine, they were of great service to the young woman I was. I grew out of them as I grew into myself. Now I grow peas and potatoes.

One of the people from the village - I know his dog's name but not his - was surprised I was bothering with potatoes. Poor return on investment, he said. A lot of work when you can buy a sack for… I forget how much he said, I was too startled at the idea of potatoes taking work. Do they not generally just potate? They did last year, and that was in straight clay. I've known them to grow exuberantly in the backs of kitchen cabinets. He has a clipped lawn, anyway, so we're not talking about returns on investment.

I'm not the village witch in a homemade cape yet, but I have patched the sleeves of my oldest jumper, and I have mended one of my pairs of boots with glue, and I wave to the vicar. And I should probably go refill the birdbath, while we're selling sunshine.