Saddest thing on my front gate...

Just breaks your heart. We've rented here for a year and our lease is almost up and the owners feel like the time has come to move on and so - gulp - the sign has gone up. I think it will sell very quickly, and oh, I hope the new people love it as much as we have loved it, as much as all our friends loved it, and Joan and Greg, who rented  the year before we did - and as much as all the other people over the years. It's really a gorgeous house - and look at that sky.

So we're trying to fill these last days with goodbyes and final glimpses of places we loved - as well as places we almost missed seeing. Last week we found our way to an old Roman Camp which is all deserted tracks and spills of stone and small, scrubby bushes of rose and thorn and thyme -  and as we were leaving I looked at my boots (I like my hiking boots when they're hiking) and there on the ground beside them, face up and dusty, an old little button - a circlet of metal with pale yellow glass inset. We  asked at the tiny museum in town, and the man (just an amateur, he said, but he spends every weekend out in the fields) pursed his mouth and nodded and gleamed a little and said,

"Yes.  Roman. Well done."


He might have been kidding, of course - he was only an amateur - but still.

When we asked if we could keep it he said  "But of course. By the right of your eye."

So it's probably only a button. But it's one of my treasures, now - if for nothing else than that wonderful moment of finding. 

And to show you when we come home.