Emily orders the best of tea, butter and flour from the general store in Mitchelstown and trades the eggs to get us prime cuts of beef from the abattoir beyond the mill. Our fruit trees and bushes overflow in late summer, thanks to the warm, inland climate, and this will keep her busy with jam-making all through the autumn, more goods in her intricate system of bartering for the best produce from the neighbouring farm. I have grown pleasantly stout under Emily's new regime of spending and trading and sometimes see myself unexpectedly in shop windows: a prosperous, well-dressed woman nearly sixty, so far removed from the restless girl I still believe myself to be.
from The Diary of Mary Travers by Eibhear Walshe (2014)
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