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House Miscellany
Jan. 2nd, 2023 12:39 pmBack home. Before I even went inside with my bags, last night in the pleasant Wellington cool, I pulled a few clumps of kaikuia grass out of the herb bed. I've just been weeding again, and watering the petunias I planted in a toilet bowl which, for the first year I lived here, was entirely concealed in weeds. My house has two working toilets, the indoor toilet and the outdoor ghost toilet. I've started thinking of the petunia toilet as the pagan toilet, but it doesn't have a generally used name - actually 'petunia toilet' sounds better, doesn't it.*
The neighbors with whom we share our lawn, a partial fence supporting washing lines on both sides marking the boundary, have have worked their way up their half of the garden and come around the top to our strip of planters. I'm not sure if this is technically encroachment - it certainly violates our sense of custom, but since flatmate R's ex happened to move in downstairs we've mostly avoided dialogue, the breakup having been civil but not exactly amicable, so I'm not sure what their garden beliefs are. I feel a need to hurriedly weed the top planter box which they have begun to designate as a weed pile site for the sake of future hopes and dreams of planting. So far they have done one thing I found irritating: I'd decided on a place to put a chair and they put a box for sheltering seedlings there instead. (Whose glass lid slopes harshly down from right to left across the property instead of being slanted with the curve of the slope, like my garden bench would have been. I have mainly recovered from my Opinions on this topic but they are not entirely gone).
I've been working part-time as a gardener these eight (!) years, but only recently started to feel an enjoyment in the overall shape of a garden, as opposed to just doing the weeding that's in front of me. I think it comes both of reading a design book - hence my Opinions - and of seeing my employer Raewyn prune and remove trees - in some cases trees I planted. Once I accepted this, the last of my childhood sense that any tree, once threatened with removal, becomes immediately beloved (I was an annoying child to have in the garden) melted away, and I came home and enthusiastically pruned several of our bordering trees.
Speaking of which - it's lovely to see how my mother's house has become en-treed. The manuka on the hillock by the lower water tank, the manuka in the ditch by the road, the two big native plantings down by the creek, the feijoas and lemons, the plane trees which grew from an uncle's firewood to tower over anything else around them, the conifer in the paddock which we decorated as a Christmas tree as high as we could reach, which with a ladder was about halfway - all very green and good. I wish I could reassure my child self, who was sad at the removal of a line of camellias, that all would be well. (I'd probably just sulkily reply to myself that they won't be these trees, I love these trees. True, younger self, true).
And not to finish by speaking ill of our neighbors, they bought the hose we use, maintain the compost bin, and are generally pleasant people to smile hello to as we pass each other on the path or on the deck. (Also our garden remains in a homely state of shabbiness, our vegetable garden more a gesture than anything practical, so it's easy to see why one might think it could be taken into better management. But patience, patience, neighbors! We're getting there!)
...
The great-aunt I mailed a little jigsaw to, and saw twice on this holiday, reciprocated with fridge magnets, Poetry edition. The set has words like Goddess, Pearl, Eternity, Loathing, and Azure. It can mingle on our fridge with the Kiwi edition, which at the moment is producing phrases like,
'lammington fritter'
'mine the hoon'
'where when westie'
'up the skint pav creek'
and
'vegemite marmite L&P chippy toast'.
...
Getting back after travel has me making a list of long-intended home improvements: 1. bigger fridge (we swapped in the small old backup fridge when our old one gave up the ghost and never replaced it). 2. catflap (our cat currently jumps in and out the bathroom window, which is over a concerning drop - but cats are good at those; the other thing is that when the bathroom window is open I'm more bothered by the bathroom fan in the night. The fact that 'how to soundproof my room better?' yields 'Get catflap' within a few steps is one of the reasons I tend to throw up my hands and do something else). 3. Check if anyone likes the brown faded flower-vase painting in the kitchen because if not I want it gone. (It would need to be replaced, because it hangs precariously on a trio of panels glued to the wall, with a knife, fork, and spoon on them, which are kitschy and boring. Or, my mother or possibly sister suggested asking R to paint something else on those panels, which would be deeply on-brand).
*An old pasta dishing spoon, with a smiley face in the bowl, broke at my mother's house while I was staying there. I'd always seen the smiling spoon as companionable, but seen through the lens of my flat's aesthetic - flatmate R had just been posting unsettling clown doll pictures in the flat chat, and the clown's smile has become an in-joke that can be referenced by posting various other similar smiles, actually let me pause this and post an archaic smile statue now while I think of it - I realised that this could also be seen as creepy, so I have taken the spoon head home to leave in the ghost toilet. The ghost also gave the flat a marble figurine of a man seated upon a stump with an immensely large top lip and anatomically unlikely feet, which cost $4.50 at the op shop and was a steal at the price, garnering appreciative 'Oh no's.
The neighbors with whom we share our lawn, a partial fence supporting washing lines on both sides marking the boundary, have have worked their way up their half of the garden and come around the top to our strip of planters. I'm not sure if this is technically encroachment - it certainly violates our sense of custom, but since flatmate R's ex happened to move in downstairs we've mostly avoided dialogue, the breakup having been civil but not exactly amicable, so I'm not sure what their garden beliefs are. I feel a need to hurriedly weed the top planter box which they have begun to designate as a weed pile site for the sake of future hopes and dreams of planting. So far they have done one thing I found irritating: I'd decided on a place to put a chair and they put a box for sheltering seedlings there instead. (Whose glass lid slopes harshly down from right to left across the property instead of being slanted with the curve of the slope, like my garden bench would have been. I have mainly recovered from my Opinions on this topic but they are not entirely gone).
I've been working part-time as a gardener these eight (!) years, but only recently started to feel an enjoyment in the overall shape of a garden, as opposed to just doing the weeding that's in front of me. I think it comes both of reading a design book - hence my Opinions - and of seeing my employer Raewyn prune and remove trees - in some cases trees I planted. Once I accepted this, the last of my childhood sense that any tree, once threatened with removal, becomes immediately beloved (I was an annoying child to have in the garden) melted away, and I came home and enthusiastically pruned several of our bordering trees.
Speaking of which - it's lovely to see how my mother's house has become en-treed. The manuka on the hillock by the lower water tank, the manuka in the ditch by the road, the two big native plantings down by the creek, the feijoas and lemons, the plane trees which grew from an uncle's firewood to tower over anything else around them, the conifer in the paddock which we decorated as a Christmas tree as high as we could reach, which with a ladder was about halfway - all very green and good. I wish I could reassure my child self, who was sad at the removal of a line of camellias, that all would be well. (I'd probably just sulkily reply to myself that they won't be these trees, I love these trees. True, younger self, true).
And not to finish by speaking ill of our neighbors, they bought the hose we use, maintain the compost bin, and are generally pleasant people to smile hello to as we pass each other on the path or on the deck. (Also our garden remains in a homely state of shabbiness, our vegetable garden more a gesture than anything practical, so it's easy to see why one might think it could be taken into better management. But patience, patience, neighbors! We're getting there!)
...
The great-aunt I mailed a little jigsaw to, and saw twice on this holiday, reciprocated with fridge magnets, Poetry edition. The set has words like Goddess, Pearl, Eternity, Loathing, and Azure. It can mingle on our fridge with the Kiwi edition, which at the moment is producing phrases like,
'lammington fritter'
'mine the hoon'
'where when westie'
'up the skint pav creek'
and
'vegemite marmite L&P chippy toast'.
...
Getting back after travel has me making a list of long-intended home improvements: 1. bigger fridge (we swapped in the small old backup fridge when our old one gave up the ghost and never replaced it). 2. catflap (our cat currently jumps in and out the bathroom window, which is over a concerning drop - but cats are good at those; the other thing is that when the bathroom window is open I'm more bothered by the bathroom fan in the night. The fact that 'how to soundproof my room better?' yields 'Get catflap' within a few steps is one of the reasons I tend to throw up my hands and do something else). 3. Check if anyone likes the brown faded flower-vase painting in the kitchen because if not I want it gone. (It would need to be replaced, because it hangs precariously on a trio of panels glued to the wall, with a knife, fork, and spoon on them, which are kitschy and boring. Or, my mother or possibly sister suggested asking R to paint something else on those panels, which would be deeply on-brand).
*An old pasta dishing spoon, with a smiley face in the bowl, broke at my mother's house while I was staying there. I'd always seen the smiling spoon as companionable, but seen through the lens of my flat's aesthetic - flatmate R had just been posting unsettling clown doll pictures in the flat chat, and the clown's smile has become an in-joke that can be referenced by posting various other similar smiles, actually let me pause this and post an archaic smile statue now while I think of it - I realised that this could also be seen as creepy, so I have taken the spoon head home to leave in the ghost toilet. The ghost also gave the flat a marble figurine of a man seated upon a stump with an immensely large top lip and anatomically unlikely feet, which cost $4.50 at the op shop and was a steal at the price, garnering appreciative 'Oh no's.
