Cottage of Enchantment

Once upon a time there was a small girl. When she grew up she wanted to live in a Beatrix Potter house on the edge of the woods beside a stream. There’d be bunches of fresh herbs from the garden drying above the cast iron stove, on a wooden rack, hams smoking inside the chimney, bread rising on the hearth and two pretty attic bedrooms with patchwork quilts and goose feather pillows. Clothes would flutter from a line hoisted high in the air by a forked Manuka stick and spring freesias and jasmine would scent the air. Decades later this small girl was now an elderly woman and she at last had her cottage built of pale honey coloured clay blocks, with cedar doors and windows. Geraniums filled the window boxes and a pinecone fire burned in the parlour.  It was everything she’d dreamed it would be all those years before, her own enchanted cottage on the edge of a wood beside a stream, romantic and charming.

I was that small girl, and now, due to circumstances I cannot change, my cottage is on the market.