Onewhero in Autumn

[landingtree]

seahearth and I are visiting Justy and Tim for Easter at the Onewhero house, a lifestyle block amid farms. The sun is hot enough in the afternoons on the west side of the house that the sunporch and the bookroom where I'm sleeping are uninhabitable, but the nights are cold enough that we're lighting the living-room fire. The nights are clear, the moon bright enough to give the trees shadows. The big hill, Pukeotahinga, is dry, and so are the choppy little hills and ridges running off to the southward horizon. The paddocks are dry, one short and scrubby and the other silver with long, fallen hay. Gus, the oranger of the kunekune pigs, is vivid against it. Penelope, blonde and black, is very sociable at the moment, and if scratched behind the ears falls over in bliss almost immediately -- hence her other name, Topple, mostly now fallen out of use. (We had a conversation about the origins of the word 'disgruntled'. It seems that 'gruntle' is an old word meaning 'utter little grunts', with 'dis' as intensifier. To disgruntle a pig is therefore ambiguous. If the pig has just fallen over, uttering little grunts means 'keep scratching belly and ears.' Otherwise, it's a query about the next meal. The second is more common -- but only cats and humans ever look as blissful as a toppled pig).

The eternal renovations are reached several long-planned stages. So the L-shaped attachment to the garage where seahearth and I used to sleep no longer exists in its old form -- and a good thing too, since the old form had its carpet laid directly on concrete, with damp rising through the cracks. Books too long ignored on the shelves there would be mortared together by mason-bees.

For the first day I would every so often think of going through the house to the outside-room before remembering it isn't there anymore. In its place is a temporarily surreal space: the roof is high, with no ceiling under it. To the Northwest, a table tennis table, and the window out over the vege garden and one of the paddocks; to the Southeast, a bed, bedside lamp, shelves full of clothes; to the Southwest, the door, a foot off the ground; and to the Northeast, a wall currently defined only by structural beams, beyond which is the garage, with roller-door and tool-benches, meat freezer and electric organ (on its way out), an incentive against letting your table tennis shots go long.

The other running renovation -- well, apart from painting the outside of that new garage-rooms complex on some substantial trestles -- is the replacement of the kitchen window. This also feels surreal:




While Tim and Justy and I were lifting the old window down, seahearth was on the other side of it making caramel. The conversation about this on the way from the airport went something like,

seahearth: "Can we stop somewhere along the way where we can get shellac or lacquer?"

Justy: "Sure. Where?

seahearth: "I don't know. Definitely Bunnings would have it, but maybe an art supply shop."

Me: "Why do you need lacquer?"

Justy: "Oh, she told me about this -- it's for caramel."

Me: "Caramel?"

seahearth: "Yes. I'm weaving it."

No workable weaving caramel has yet been produced -- it's a design class project -- but experiments continue.

There's also a new bushwalk since I was last here in September: a gate where there was never a gate before, leading to path tacking backward and forward down a slope all over stones, through gorse and barberry and outnumbered native trees. Part of a long project to restore the slope. Tim is chopping it out at a great rate on rare unbusy days. I don't think I'd ever walked on that part of the slope, though seahearth and I plunged down through the pines off to the left of it, and scrambled a few times down the waterfall where the stream goes down far to the right of it.

Then there are all the books from our childhoods which were in the outside-room and are now in the poolhouse on the table. The poolhouse is in one of its 'chock-full of odds and ends' phases, after having been a bedroom again for a while (although even then it had boat mattresses in it). I'm the only one who hasn't looked through the books yet, and I'm going slowly, pausing every time I start to sneeze from the dust of mason-bee cocoons. Many of the books are damaged from much reading, or from damp and bees, or both, but none of the ones I want to keep so far have been. There are lots I'm happy to send on their way, and a few I actually want to keep and read, and only a very few which I have no desire ever to read again yet still want to hang onto. (Karazan Quartet).

The dingy which, on its first outing, sank under me and Tim on the way into a small bay, is now sitting in the middle of the poolhouse lawn, waiting to become a flowerbed. [Edit: no, strawberry patch.] The beehives have moved. The manuka clump on the hillock by the watertank is a little larger.

Now the cats and dog are eating their dinners, Saphira managing very well with her three remaining teeth and Butterscotch eating more than she usually does at a sitting, and Snoopy once again temporarily convinced that dogroll is food. The other cat, Suvine or Mozenrath depending who you asked, has died. I wouldn't necessarily have seen her yet on this visit anyway, she would have been spending almost all this time sitting in the laundry cupboard

There have been easter eggs, chocolate kiwis, hot cross buns, chocolate french toast (successful experiment), the first good pumpkin from the patch down by the creek, short walks, a lot of table tennis, scrabble, shifting trestles, lifting windows. I have been rereading The Claw of the Conciliator, because Gene Wolfe is dead, and I would like to manage to like his writing. I have a cold which has me more of an invalid than most colds do; its symptoms have retreated, except for what usually retreats first: headache and tiredness when I do anything as strenuous as walking up slopes. Hoping this goes away soon. But it is being a fine holiday.

Comments

[leaflemming]

Ah, I'd forgotten that tank farm screening. Truthfully, it wasn't so much the size of the screen as the size of the audience. Life of Brian more than any film I know plays better with a big crowd -- especially in the scene where the Roman soldiers are desperately trying not to laugh. It becomes contagiously hilarious if enough people are around you. I remember being disappointed by the way that didn't happen, at the tank farm. The Embassy screening was sold out; which seemed to mean I wasn't going to get into it, and in fact I'd only gone down there to spend half an hour talking with Jan before she went in, because she was going to be away for all of Easter. But it happened that she'd forgotten her glasses, and therefore needed to sit at the front... and since it was sold out, she thought she'd better go in early... and when she did, I happened to notice that the people on the door were paying very little attention. So, um, I may have followed her in. There turned out to be at least 50 or 60 empty seats, I'm not sure how they arrived at calling it sold out. But the crowd was big enough to generate a very satisfying humour amplification effect.

The other reason I wanted to see it at the Embassy, and with Jan, is that the first time I ever saw it was the same day I'd been to a film festival screening, at the Embassy and with Jan. An elegant and beautiful Italian film, four short stories, somewhat fantastical; I can't remember much more than that. On the way home I walked past the student union building and Life of Brian was on that evening, and I decided to go; and I enjoyed myself so much more than I had at the film festival one that I drew a quite false conclusion about my own artistic preferences. It was decades before I really started paying attention to the film festival again. So seeing Life of Brian at the Embassy with Jan had a very pleasing circularity to it.

The wind turbine ride was very good for me -- less good for ablackart, who had not ridden her mountain bike for a couple of months and was dismayed to find her trail riding skills had atrophied. This is a thing that's happened to me in the past and I should have known it would happen to her... we shall go ride some easier trials some day soon and she'll find her intuitive sense of where the trail edges are has restored itself. Scary to ride without that. (We shall not go today, because it's raining steadily here). (Though in fact she's out running in it right now).

I unexpectedly finished my current book chapter yesterday -- I'd thought there was a whole scene still to write but it became very clear this scene belongs in a later chapter. As usual there are several things I'm very unsure of as to how it reads. I shall send it to you and seahearth for comment -- respond when convenient, no rush.