![Picture](/uploads/2/3/1/6/23164998/p1121965_orig.jpg)
Celia arrived in a well-loved hatchback filled with dusty planters, blankets and piles of old newspapers. She was a prim lady with a wild, earthy look about her. From our weeks together, I understood her to be an intelligent, rugged and resourceful woman with a preference for sharing her opinions over receiving others'. We'd often fall into accidental debates in the evening over dinner, usually ending without achieving real common ground. Our time in Foxford was rich with learning moments and rife with interpersonal challenges.
Work on the Estate
![Picture](/uploads/2/3/1/6/23164998/editor/img-20150103-111953.jpg?250)
This experience gave us a rough and intriguing glimpse into the challenges of a traditional livelihood in which a good portion of the day's labor hours go to caring for basic needs. I've lived a pretty privileged life with food from a nearby market, automated heating on a dial, an indoor toilet and hot shower and a surplus of electricity for all my lights and gadgets. Not so everywhere!
A daily chore of ours was tending to the heating fuel: chopping wood and moving piles of cut peat from the yard heap into the barn to dry, then from the dry pile into manageable bags in the side-yard nearer the main house and essential iron stove! My understanding from Celia is that land ownership comes with a certain acreage of peat bog in the region and most locals pay a service fee to have it cut into skinny planks and delivered to their homes. Once it's sufficiently dried, it burns hotter and longer than wood. A few nights we were lucky enough to have a few pieces of coal thrown in, which burned even better! This unceasing effort fueled a small iron stove in the center of the house and heated water as well. Everywhere else was basically wet and frigid.
Daily Life Conditions
![Picture](/uploads/2/3/1/6/23164998/published/img-1177.jpg?1521328110)
Daily life was hard at this country nursery. In this way, our basic needs required a lot of physical labor, foresight and mental preparation to endure well. I imagine I too would be drawn to save and use every last tool and resource to its greatest duration, hoping to aid future effort. We learned so much from these experiences but decided that the fear of eating and living in this space was more than we could adapt to. We decided to leave early - our only volunteer home that we did so - emailing other hosts and making preparations in many-mile pub hikes during evenings after working.
Adventures in the area
![Picture](/uploads/2/3/1/6/23164998/published/img-1176_1.jpg?1521330070)
One day we got especially antsy and hiked the 6+ miles to Foxford where we wandered town, bought groceries and posted up at a local pub to eat, drink and blog. :) We lost track of time and departed in the last light of twilight, wandering towards our temporary home. The hike quickly ratcheted up my anxiety as we exited town, losing street and building lights. Oncoming cars blazed towards us through the pitch black night, road glossy with evening mist. We had a crank flashlight that was low on batteries that we'd point towards oncoming cars to alert them to our presence. It became an hour an a half of cautious speed-walking in the road, winding the dinky flashlight's dial and dodging into the nettle-filled stone walls on the narrow roadside when a fast-moving car whizzed by. Eventually a man pulled a sharp u-turn, stopped beside us and yelled out his window through the rain "You're going to be killed!" He pushed his door open and we jumped in obediently. He made it very clear that no one walks these roads at night and helpfully dropped us at our familiar Copper Beech, leaving us the easy 2 mile walk home on the quiet that we'd become accustomed to.