100 days - Day 1

Dunk posted yesterday about 100 Days To Offload, which sounds like just what I need at the moment. My blog posting has dropped off significantly over the last couple of years, and even more so recently. It feels as if I have lost confidence in any thought that goes through my head, an overwhelming sense of being irrelevant. I joined Extinction Rebellion in 2018 with a huge surge of enthusiasm and feeling of power, which over time had petered away to a disheartened ignoring of all their facebook posts. I have started crying at work. Even writing this is hard. Maybe if I force myself to write down thoughts ... who knows ... whatever, 

I read this book a few weeks ago, I wanted to write about it but had reached the point where I assumed only bots visit my blog so why bother. Homestead by Rosina Lippi. It was so, so lovely. It is set in a remote farming community in Austria, across the span of the 20th century, following the lives of the people. During that time, barring the devastation of the world wars, their lives remain utterly unchanged. They farm, they marry, they have children, they die. I fell in love with both the people and the place in a way I have not done with a book for a long time. 

"Barbara stood there looking back towards Half-Moon Hollow, where she had lived for just over a year, where she had been the farmer's wife, where she had thought to live out her life and bear her children and die. Then she looked up towards Bengat, the house leaning out over the cliff. Her mother's household, and after that, when one day her mother was gone, her sister-in-law Anna's.
But there was nowhere else to go, and so she climbed the path to Bengat and let herself be taken in.
The only surprise waiting for her was the sheep: her father said they were hers, in her charge. Whatever profit came from them belonged to her, and when she married again she would have a dowry any farmer would be glad of. Barbara tried to look surprised at the idea of marrying again, ashamed of the fact that this thought had come to her almost as soon as Franz Michel died. Before the last of his blood had been soaked out of her apron." (p.75)

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload