So what is your dream?

One of the magic things about blogging is how one blog needs to another and you discover new favourites to add to your personal list. By just this sort of hopping along I found Sally at who's the mummy and another world of fascinating blogs. Sally blogged in response to a tag about her dream and has kindly tagged me to write about mine.

Well this is tricky. When I was younger I could have told you about the dream of living on a Scottish island, or running a bookshop with a coffee shop attached. I could have written about the dream of travelling through New Zealand in a campervan, revisiting the places where I spent my adolescence, finding out if the grass is as brown, the sky as blue, the sea as ultramarine as I remember it. I could have told you about the dream of having children (somewhat unrealistic as a I recall. I thought I could read novels while the baby slept contentedly in its pram. Huh.) Even a few years ago I could have told you about the dream of living in the country, away from the press of urban life, with a bit of land and a few chickens. But now I am, I suppose, living my dream and it is hard to write about it without sounding smug or sentimental.

I always wanted to live in the country sometime. When I sweated on tubes in London and sat in traffic jams in Manchester being in the city always felt temporary. One day I would look out onto fields and pick my own apples. But somehow life hardened round me. Jobs and children and their schools and friends all coalesced to form a life which was essentially suburban. Now don't get me wrong, there is loads to love in suburbia and I am not one of those who derides it. In many way I suspect my children had a more interesting life, especially as teenagers, with far more opportunities for independence than they might have had out in the sticks, dependent on adults for a taxi service. But rural life was something I was going to do one day.

And then one day, and I now can't remember how the dawning realisation hardened into resolution, we found ourselves thinking that if we were going to do this, when exactly was it going to happen? The children had left home. Yes, there were jobs and ties and responsibilities but it wasn't that we couldn't move away if we planned it carefully enough. And so we did. It took plenty of sweat and sleepless nights and planning and forethought and blind pigheaded determination but four years ago we moved here and swapped an Edwardian house in the leafy suburbs for a sixteenth century farmhouse with outbuildings and a holiday cottage and a view across a quiet valley in the Clwydian hills.

So now I wake every morning to silence or birdsong and the view across the valley. Nobody comes past, other than the occasional walker on a foot path, and I have swapped traffic noise for the bleating of sheep and sound of a tractor working on the far hill. Having spent years of my life trying to coax an oasis from tiny town gardens with sour soil and little privacy we now have a couple of acres of field and trees. I love it. Even now I have to shake myself every now and then to remind myself that I live here. I'm not on holiday, I am not just passing through. This is home.

I always wanted chickens and now we have them scratching contentedly in the garden. I am not one for anthropomorphism and at one stage I would not have been able to tell you if the idea of a contented chicken was a city dweller's fantasy. Now I know that you can tell when a chicken is having a good time and when it is not. They even have a chicken version of excitement. When they see you coming down to let them out they line up shouting to each other, rocking slightly on their feet like a runner at the blocks.

It is very green and beautiful and the seasons are up close and in your face. Summer is always at some point a hazy dream of shimmering grass. Autumn overflows with harvest in the garden and in the hedgerows. Winter can cut to the bone but is beautiful in its severity. Spring stuns you every year with snowdrops and daffodils and new lambs. Everything is as I expected it would be but writ large: more beautiful, harder work, hotter, colder, windier, quieter, more still. The birdsong is more rapturously noisy. The piles of apples waiting to be made into jellies are bigger. The difference between sun and rain, sunrise and sunset, solitude and company: they are all vivid and alive in a way my city life never was.

It is not all robins and lambs and apple blossom. Sometimes it can be lonely and it is always hard work. It might not suit everyone to be here all year round but I am a round peg in a round hole. I will put another log in the woodburner and go out and walk round the garden. This is where I want to be.