I’m going to start this post with a story.

In the early nineteenth century there was a young woman who worked as a laundress, travelling from remote farmsteads to small hamlets, helping the housewives with their monthly wash. Her long fingered hands were raw from lye. Her arms were mottled and powerful from the scrubbing in cold water and the wringing of sheets. At one of these farms she met a young shepherd. “That’s the man I’m going to marry” she said to herself, and four years later she did. They ran on their own flock of hardy sheep on the mountain, and took on a smallholding. They had two children, a boy and a girl.