Member-only story
“Hippie Valley” Tales
One cold Welsh winter, many years ago, I lived on land that belonged to a travelling family who had tired of the road. In the most distant field from their dwellings, I lived in a little caravan in a pasture with only my dog and a woodstove that banked rather poorly.
I had met their Matriarch on her travels in Spain and she gave me sanctuary when my marriage broke down the next year. Red dog and I, we fled civilization and holed up in our wee caravan, long beyond where the sidewalk ends.
At first, I was weak. I couldn’t carry enough water, chop wood safely, or light a fire properly. I couldn’t tell a chickweed sprout from a pea sprout. I was useless. But I survived.
The first six months I spent there I was warned off of speaking to any neighbours I may encounter. I would sometimes walk the Matriarch’s eggs to her egg box at the top of a track nearby. I knew others lived a sort of tenuous, barely council sanctioned existence up there but I knew nothing of their stories, really. I simply knew that the eggs were to be replaced and the money tin collected, then the box relocked. If anyone greeted me, I smiled and nodded but never spoke.
One day when I was in the nearest village shopping, a woman got to asking me about myself. She seemed to think I lived somewhere called Hippie Valley when I described the sort of area, vaguely that I…