Broadway

Dear everyone,

The beginning of our summer holiday was very wet.  Thursday it rained all day without a break, which is unusual in England.  Normally, a rain cloud will empty and then move on.  Often it will softly rain when the sky is blue and sunny.  I have learned to look to the West.  If I see a dark cloud, I wait five minutes to leave the house.  Once it has passed it is safe to go outside.  I can say that the rain rarely catches me.  If it does rain, you simply pop into a shop or stop for a cup of tea and wait till it passes.  

So Sunday we went to our sweet church, St. Phillip and St. James (Pip and Jim’s) and afterwards pounced on the sunny day.  J took the boys golfing while S, A and I went out for a drive in the country.  We headed to Broadway, a picturesque Cotswold village.  I mean this town is cute. It is a postcard village with honey colored Cotswold stone houses with worn steps and many with impossibly small front doors.  Each house looks so content, joyfully sitting in the same place for hundreds of years, maybe leaning just a bit with age. Every house is covered in wisteria and heavily scented roses in such a way that I wonder if one could exist without the other.  Gardens explode with color-always shades of pink and purple and white.  You’ve never seen more plump and satisfied bees.  Every so often, just for punctuation, there will stand a storybook thatched roof cottage with a cheerfully painted front door, window boxes bursting and dripping and timbered walls alive with ambling roses.  The houses often have names, not number for addresses, names like Tittlemouse House and The Old Bakery. Tipsy Cottage and Snowdrop House.  Or The Rabbit Box.  I am SO naming our house when we go home…

On High Street, girls serve ice cream from old fashioned white carts wearing white Capri pants, pink shirts and straw boater hats, pink ribbons fluttering in every breeze 

Because S and I were not overpowered by testosterone, we decided to take the long way home.  Understand that to get from Cheltenham to Broadway you take a scenic two-lane road.  Such was the beauty of the day, even a two-lane road seemed too fast paced for us. With lavender fields in my rear view mirror, we found a one-lane road that took us up hills and down into valleys, through miles of crazy quilt farmland separated by stone fences.  We passed hundreds of fluffy sheep, but not a house for miles.  We drove downward through dense forest, which had the feel of burrowing and when the occasional beam of sunlight broke through, the damp air and dust made the light swirl like a dream. It was a fairy tale.  Indeed, I told A that he should keep an eye out for fairies; as everyone knows these are the sorts of places fairies prefer to gather. S empathically agreed.  ‘The fairies are all dead,’ was A’s response from the back seat after a minute or two of looking. S is now concerned about his mental health.

When we reemerged onto a two-lane road, we followed another crooked wooden sign in the shape of an arrow.  We drove down a wonderfully winding and wooded road, a deep ravine on the passenger’s side.  We curled our way through one more chocolate box village, avoiding walkers and horses in the roadway.  In town, people are less willing to smile, but in the country everyone smiles, waves and nods.  There is an agreeable sense of unity when you share sunshine and unhurried space with bikers, walkers and riders.

Memories like these will make my heart ache when we return to the US.

With love from England,

T-Ann