“Anything else you need,” he said, “just let me know. It’s going to be tough for you, I’d think, being here on your own. Especially in the winter.” He drove off down the lane again, and although there have been several times when I have needed his help, we have never talked much, and I don’t think he knows any more about me now than he did after that first visit nine years ago. The very pleasant thing about him is that he has never asked.

The garden was good, although there was no credit to me, because I didn’t know, that first year, what I was doing. I froze many of the vegetables for winter; I knew that much about getting through the season that everyone I had spoken to warned me about. I was feeling some urgency to be safe, and the fall was a season of hurry. Cutting the last of the wood, adding it to the enormous, satisfying piles behind the cabin; freezing, preserving vegetables, working hard all day, sweat pouring in the evenings from the boiling water for blanching, sometimes seeing myself stranded here in mid-winter with a freezer-full of spoiled food, cold, hemmed in by snow, deadly alone, and the vision added fuel to my urgency.

Almost everything that could be done was finished before the first snow. There was nothing left to can or freeze, no space left, in fact, in the freezer. There was a little wood still waiting to be dealt with, a few squash still in the garden, but almost all over. I was exhausted, and worried, too, about the enemy coming up, for that year I thought of winter as an enemy, and I rested and cleaned and made lists for a couple of days before I made, as I had to, the trip to town.

I was reluctant to go, frightened, for I did not want to disrupt my balance here, didn’t want to face people; I had achieved a sense of well-being, but it was still a delicate thing, and I had no wish to dislodge it.

The trip, of course, was necessary. There were dozens of things I would need for the winter that I could not supply myself: fuses, an electric heater for the bedroom, food stocks like milk powder; I had gone without meat after the supplies I brought with me ran out, and it seemed that I didn’t miss it. There was only one luxury that I pined for, that I wanted to indulge; I had a picture in my mind of the winter, and I wanted some coal oil lamps, perhaps three, because I thought they would add a softness, tranquillity, to the time. I wanted to be able to spend the winter in dimly-lit rooms, reading or sewing, or sketching or writing by the flicking light. A romantic picture.