Friday 5 May 2017

Dream home, dream boulders and dream birds

I'm building a house! 
Right now.
Well, not with my own bare hands.
But, as I write this, there is concrete being poured into holes ... or ditches ... or some other sort of thingy that makes the house stay put instead of slipping down the hillside when the first rains come along. Foundations? Footings? Who knows? (Hopefully, the builder!)

Anyway, I'm excited.

The Great Dane and I have been planning this for two and half years. When we started, we thought we'd be done in a year. 
'Ha ha ha!' I hear the wise ones amongst you say - laughing with us, not at us, of course! 
And it has been a little bit frustrating at times.
But now, here we are, seeing stuff happen on our little slice of countryside.

We now have a real driveway with drains and edges and all-weather access. That's important, you know. Country living has a lot going for it, but there's nothing romantic about parking your car at the front gate and wading five hundred metres through knee-deep mud to get to your house with a week's worth of groceries dangling from your hands. Not even if you have a sturdy pair of gumboots and thighs like tree trunks. 


THE road! Gumboots optional - unless
you want to wade through the cow pats

at the edges.

We also have a real housing site, perched on the edge of the hill, with views to Mount Alexander in the south, hills in the north and plains far, far out to the east. And that housing site has pipes poking up through it - little poly-pipe whispers of showers and toilets and sinks to come. 
Hints of a house to come.

And there's half a shed site - rather large and growing bigger by the hour. The Great Dane and our otherwise-sensible builder have banded together and chanted,  'No amount of shed is too much shed!' so many times that I gave up arguing for the quaint little garden shed/chook house that I had pictured in my dreams. On the up side, if ever I trade my car in for a jumbo jet, there'll be ample covered parking available.
I've also been dreaming of taking control
of this bulldozer, but the owner doesn't
leave the key in the ignition. RUDE!
Watching all this progress is terribly exciting. It's like seeing a whole new life unfold in front of us. 

But the thing that thrills me most, every time I go out to our little slice of land, is ... the little slice of land! The bits that remain unchanged. And will always remain unchanged. 

Because no matter how hard we try, we can't improve on the natural world. The best house design, even coupled with the most hip-and-happening interior decorating, will always fall short of what lies outside our four walls. There's a rugged hill with granite boulders and a  cheeky breeze to flap your hair and scarf about. The lower paddock is a paradise of gnarled trees, delicate mosses, strange rock formations, shy kangaroos and flitting pardalotes. And all about there are magpies carolling, cockatoos arguing, crimson rosellas raising their olive green kiddies*, falcons hovering and and a sea of grass that ripples in the wind - sometimes golden, sometimes green, depending on the season.

It's beautiful and every time I visit, I take time to sit on a rock.
To simply sit and feel blessed.









*Okay, so baby rosellas are not kiddies, but I'm writing a blog here, not a field guide to birds!

1 comment:

  1. Love it!!! Say hello to the Great Dane!! happy house building Ruth Young of Goulburn NSW Ag days

    ReplyDelete