The Farm

We moved to Edwin's family farm in the spring, and the village welcomed me the way warm water welcomes you, all at once and a little too eagerly. The women brought bread. They asked when I was due. I was not due anything, I was not even pregnant, and I laughed and said so, and the women laughed too but they exchanged a look first, a quick one, the kind you are not meant to catch. Edwin had grown quieter the closer we got to home. He had told me his family had farmed this valley for two hundred years and that the soil here was the best in the county, and both of those things turned out to be true. He had not told me about the calendar in the church porch, the one that marked off the years in twenties, nor that this year, the year we came home, had a small red mark beside it.