Serendipity

What a fabulous day it's been, the last of the year. Wall-to-wall sunshine and just a bit of a nippy wind. I went into Fram to post my thankyou cards and an annual parcel to Canada, and when I got back it was so beguiling that I put my hiking boots on and set off. My excuse, if I needed one, was to take a load of empty egg boxes back to the village produce stall, but I kept on well past it and funnelled off down the long lane to Bruisyard, past Cransford Hall. I could have walked forever it was so great to be out, and to be fit.

Boundary Farm B&B

It seems I was meant to live here. I have just this minute fitted the missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle which I have been trying halfheartedly to finish for two years. In the end it only took a phone call, one I could have made at any time but was oddly reluctant to. When we were house-hunting in 2008 we stayed at a B&B at one end of this village, and I love the coincidence of this and the fact that I well remember walking up the lane towards where I now live on a hot Sunday morning in summer and declaring that I had never been anywhere so perfect. The wheat gleamed golden in the fields, the air was filled with birdsong, and it was still and quiet, a scene out of Lark Rise to Candleford if ever there was one. But much earlier we spent New Year somewhere near here, in a very old house with a glass panel on one wall showing the wattle and daub from which the building had been constructed. I could see this building in my mind's eye, and suspected it could have been High House Farm, located at the other end of the village though I wasn't completely sure. I remember that we had the devil's job finding it, pre sat-nav, on a dark evening in late December. The year must have been 2002 or 2003, perhaps even earlier. There was a huge Christmas tree in the hall filling the stairwell to the floor above, easily 20 feet tall, and our bedroom was on such a slope that every time we got out of bed we were propelled at speed to the end wall.

High House Farm B&B

The sloping bedroom

I passed this house on my walk earlier as I often have before, but this time something compelled me to check it out. So I rang the owner just now, a neighbour whom I know, and asked him about the glass panel and he confirmed it. Patrick has already told me it is by far the oldest house in the village. I feel strangely moved, rather emotional. This tiny, nondescript village a few miles from the Suffolk coast, off the beaten track, unknown to almost everyone, has actually offered me sanctuary twice before. On this midwinter evening on the cusp of the year with black skies to the east and slowly darkening sky in the west, I'm sitting in my kitchen feeling as if this house, this place, was waiting for me all along. It might have known I would need sanctuary again, alone this time, and it had marked itself already in my imagination, like a beacon telling me it would be there when I was ready. I know this all might sound far-fetched and whimsical, but it is giving me a wonderful sense of contentment, of rightness, as I prepare to start another year, another chapter.

Happy New Year!