Island Wife: living on the edge of the wild

When he talks to the students for hours about research and discoveries and as they share conversation and laughter and beer, while I move in and out of the rooms supplying food and care, I feel like an outsider. And that is what I am. I may be wife, life partner, mother to all his children, but I do not fire him up like they do and perhaps that is

This house has protected us and helped us grow a family. Inside its thick strong walls, ideas have been turned into businesses, into a life that has touched on hundreds of others, changed them and made them better. It has been filled with happy guests and chattering children and our story is deep in the stones now, along with all the stories that w

Jenny always leaves for foreign parts in the winter, for she is single and brilliant and passionate about God’s creatures. She hugs me goodbye. Keep the faith! she says. And drink gin. Life around Alex will never be dull!

Never before have I seen work as a task to be shared, and not only shared, but made light on its feet with humour and pranks as if it were something wonderful and not a life sentence.

Being too busy to give any real time to a relationship is like not watering a potato crop, I say to him, using his own language. If I explain how I feel in my own, the wires in his brain twist and knot and he just has to dash out for air.

This is ancient in me, in every woman, wild and forgetting of herself amid the demands of a hungry motherless world. Suddenly

Now I know I need to be the blood and guts of a thing, the driver of the bus and never more the passenger. If I walk now, along a pavement, my legs ache from