There was real work to be started the next morning, and so I had a real breakfast, bacon and eggs and toast, before I took the hoe, new, and a shovel that I found on the grounds, and went out to turn the first garden. It was a much harder job than I’d thought, sweating, stinking back-breaking work, digging down to the roots of the long-grown weeds, pulling them out, shaking the soil off them and flinging them away. Sharp spikes from the weeds went through my heavy gloves, my legs pained with squatting, and my back ached from bending. The sun poured down and I was flushed, becoming burned; but still there was progress being made, I could move to the side and see that there were new spots cleared and a rising pile of weeds, and in the earth I could see worms jolted to the surface and the moist rich soil from underneath, so that it was no wonder the weeds had been so tough and healthy. By the time the sun was high, I was exhausted, and I returned slowly to the cabin, dragging the hoe, leaving the shovel lying where it was, and made a coffee and tried to sponge away the sweat with a towel.

It was partly the hair, I thought, the hair was down my back, clinging, damp and curling from the sweat, and I couldn’t make it stay out of the way, pinned up it just fell down again, and it was sticky, itchy on my skin. That was when I picked up the scissors and cut it away, the first time, with the same lack of nostalgia with which I’d thrown out all the long dresses. I hacked at it, almost angry, and it came away in great chunks. I could feel that it was uneven, and I tried, at the bottom at least, to clip it so that no ends hung lower than the others, but God knows what the overall effect was. It didn’t matter.

It was pleasant, sitting outside in the afternoon, muscles slowly, grindingly, returning to normal, with my old-new kitchen table, the sandpaper scrubbing at it, wearing off the paint and underneath the smell of wood, clean and breathing, as if it had been smothered for a long time and was now released. Later in the afternoon I would take the axe and try my hand at chopping wood, but for now I sat under the willow, where the sun did not beat down on me as it had in the garden, changing the rhythms of the sanding to suit my energy, looking out over the weeds and bushes, down into the empty lane where no one was expected, listening, and from here I could see a little patch of cleared garden. More would be done later, but it was an accomplishment already.