Apr. 19th, 2019

landingtree: Small person examining bottlecap (Default)
[personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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:

View of a garden through the space where the kitchen window has just been removed


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

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

Justy: "Sure. Where?

[personal profile] 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?"

[personal profile] 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 [personal profile] 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.

Profile

landingtree: Small person examining bottlecap (Default)
landingtree

August 2025

S M T W T F S
     1 2
3456789
10111213141516
1718 1920212223
24252627282930
31      

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Aug. 26th, 2025 11:29 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios