Sunday 16 July 2017

Home is where the heart is ... and the soul ... and the personality ... and a truckload of nude scultures.

I love houses. 
Apartments. 
Homes.
Because home is where the heart is.
And all the stuff that's unique to the residents of that particular home.

I'll admit that I might be a little obsessed with homes at the moment  because we're building one and trying to sell another. But, honestly,  I've been house-happy for a long time. 

When I was little, I didn't like dolls, but I loved doll houses. I built my own doll house when I was ten and spent every precious cent of my pocket money furnishing it with fine timber furniture. 

One of my most precious possessions is a house plan drawn by one of my Grade 2 students a number of years ago. He sat down beside me and explained that it was designed for himself and his future wife. He pointed out every detail, including his bedroom on the ground floor, the solar panels on the roof and his wife's bedroom two storeys up. And then, as though offering me the crown jewels, he said, 'You can keep it if you like.' I did like and I will keep it forever and always.

I doodle houses and draw houses and paint towns full of houses all the time. It verges on the obsessive. (Maybe I'm being soft on myself by saying 'verges'!)


I love looking at homes and often drive to a new suburb to walk the dog. Just so that I can walk past a whole new set of houses. 

When I travel to other towns for work, I spend my free daylight hours walking the streets looking at houses. 

When I'm overseas, one of my favourite ways to explore a new town or city is to walk the back-streets, away from the touristy sites, and look at houses. Houses reveal so much about a culture and climate.





And when I'm walking the streets on a house-gawk,  it's an absolute bonus if there's a naked window through which I can see the lounge room, kitchen or bedroom.  Not because I'm hoping to spy on people, but because I want to see how they arrange their personal spaces. The interiors of houses are even more telling than the exteriors. Looking at a lived-in room is like looking into a person's heart and soul. 

My favourite part of the weekend papers is the article in Sunday Life that features someone's home. My favourite magazine is Country Style
I love the articles that feature homes that are quirky, even slightly weird, but a true reflection of the owner's life and passions: the horse-lover's converted barn with saddles and harnesses hanging over the back of the couch; the ceramic artist's kitchen full of daggy pottery jugs and vases - the kind we all tossed out once the seventies were past; the antique collector's living room with moose-heads and railway clocks and dark-and-dirty  oil-paintings hanging from every inch of wall space.

Homes are wonderful. 
Because homes tell a story.
A fascinating story about the owner.

I love it when I enter a person's home for the first time and have an 'Aha!' moment.

'Aha! That's just what I expected their home to look like - stacks of books from floor to ceiling, a heart-shaped box of chocolates on the side table, an open fire filling the room with warmth and welcome.'

'Aha! They stuff their dead pets and display them in the lounge room.  I didn't expect that, but it explains a thing or two.'

'Aha! Purple floral curtains and orange shag-pile carpet. And it's all brand new. Bold. Interesting. And a little disturbing... Even more disturbing than a menagerie of stuffed animals.'

Once, we visited a couple whose home looked like a display home. Everything was completely new - even the crockery from which we ate - and there was not a single personal item on display. Not even a photo or a dog bowl. I felt like they were hiding something. Or, even worse, that they had so little personality that they had absolutely nothing to hide.


I'm wondering what our home says about us
Is the story it tells true?

Our house has just gone on the market, so there'll be a string of strangers wandering through in the coming weeks. 
What will be the first thing people notice when they come through our front door? 
Will they think it odd that I display old leather cricket balls and lawn bowls in a tray, like some people display fresh fruit? 
Will they wonder at the stacks of ancient prayer books and hymn books? 
Will they cringe at the pitchfork in the corner and wonder if I use it to discipline my children or if my husband uses it to keep me at bay?
Is it strange that I hang lanterns and gourds from the kitchen ceiling? That I have many birdcages but no birds? That I fill glass jars with doll furniture, sea urchins, bird nests and garlic flowers?
Will people think it rude that the garden is filled with sculptures of naked ladies? 
Will they laugh at the photos of my husband with a pigeon sitting on his head?

Will people see creativity or insanity in my home? Order or chaos? Good taste or bad?

Maybe they'll see all these things.
Because, after all, home is where the heart is.  
And the soul.
And the personality.
And a truckload of nude sculptures, home-made but artfully displayed amidst the trees.





A sample of the photos, just in case you were wondering...





Friday 7 July 2017

Wabi-sabi

Wabi-sabi. 
Now there's something I can truly embrace.
No, it's not a Japanese soup or a new breed of fluffy white dog.
It's a way of life.

Wabi-sabi is a Japanese idea that says imperfection is beautiful. 
In nature. 
In household objects.
In people.
In life.
We can find loveliness and contentment in what we have, here and now, rather than aspiring for a life filled with new, sleek, perfect things.
Sounds good, doesn't it? 



I read about wabi-sabi in the weekend papers and have read a few articles online since.
I may have over-simplified it in my mind - and in my description above.
But I don't really care. 
I just love the idea of not only accepting imperfection, but recognising it as truly beautiful.

The idea, of course, is not exclusive to the Japanese.
I believe many of us practise a form of wabi-sabi every day:

  • The gardener who delights in the fallen autumn leaves littering the grass and the self-seeded jonhnny jump ups invading the gravel path.
  • The woman who won't let her husband paint the chook shed beause the peeling paint looks so pretty.
  • The man who sees beauty in his ageing wife's wrinkles and grey hairs.
  • The op-shopper who gets excited by worn wicker baskets, chipped jugs and warped wooden tennis rackets.

I got the wabi-sabi bug. I started thinking about the things in my own life that are imperfect and truly lovely. Things both big and small, inanimate and living...

Old books 
I have old prayer books and hymn books from Sweden, Norway and Australia. They belonged to our great grandparents and feel like treasure. The ones I love most have leather covers worn as smooth a silk. 
I have faded Astrid Lindgren picture books with Danish text that were read to my husband as bedtime stories when he was a little boy. 
And I have battered old editions of Seven Little Australians and We of the Never Never that fill me with awe every time I touch them. (I know. It's weird, but true!)

Our leather lounge
Bought when the children were babies, it's had everything spilt on it (and tiddled and spewed on it!). The cushions are squished out of shape. The nubuck leather is worn shiny on the seats and armrests. And there's a cluster of holes in a flap of leather at one end where our pet rat, Scampers, made a meal of it. Really made a meal of it. She didn't even ask for the salt or the tomato sauce. She just hoofed in. 
I love this lounge. It still looks fabulous in a squishy, friendly sort of way and it records some of our family history in its scars.

Freckles
Freckles is home-made and has been a part of my life for forty-six years. My mum knitted her. She's not sophisticated by today's dolly standards. She doesn't cry or blink or wee or speak. She doesn't have a boyfriend called Ken or a shoe collection to rival that of Imelda Marcos. Rather, she oozes old-fashioned charm with her embroidered freckles, wiry wool plaits and faded silk ribbons.

Freckles snuggling up to Honey Bear.
Old toys are the best toys.  
Old boots
The ones I wear in the garden. They're tough and rough and comfy and have a lovely patina created through years of contact with sand, soil and horse manure.

Old Relatives
They have grey hair and wrinkles.  They fear the cold more than they fear tsunamis, snakes and nuclear missiles. They slip into their jarmies and dressing gowns at 5 pm no matter what's happening in the evening. They have gammy hips and dodgy hearing and complicated boxes for their medication. They wear each other's glasses and wonder why the newspaper's blurry. And they're fabulous. 
Old rellies have lots of love and lots of time. Time to chat. Time to ask about your joys and successes. Time to listen to your deepest darkest problems and tell you everything will be okay and make you truly believe it. Time to go for long drives in the country. Time to have that second glass of champagne.  Time to give you goodnight hugs and kisses. 
Morning lie-in with two of my gorgeous aunties
and a book of cryptic crosswords.
Old rellies also have time to help with crossword clues
you just can't get, no matter how hard you try.
And so I say: Go forth my friends and wabi-sabi yourselves stupid. 
It's far more relaxing, enjoyable and attainable than aiming for perfection.

What are the wabi-sabi wonders in your life?


Saturday 1 July 2017

Ramblings and meetings and greetings - tasting the country life


I'm excited.
Truly ruly excited.
We're escaping to the country. Or, given that we already live in a small regional town, I should say that we're escaping to the even-more-country.
I think I've mentioned it before.
Perhaps a hundred times.

But I'm mentioning it again because stuff is happening.
You see, up until now, everything has looked like organised piles  of dirt and blocks of concrete and stacks of timber with a fetching port-a-loo sitting to one side.
Now, however, it looks like someone is building a house.
A real, live, grown-up house.

There's a complete skeleton with walls and roof.
The builder calls them frames and trusses. But I always think of criminals when I hear the 'frame' and hernias when I hear the word 'truss'. 
I don't want to think about crime, unless Inspector Barnaby is nearby. 
And I certainly don't want to dwell on hernias. (Or dwell under hernias, as the case may be with roof trusses!)
I want to think of a sparkling new house with a view across the hills and the cows.
And now I can, thanks to the fully formed skeleton.



It's incredibly exciting to wander through the skeleton, naming rooms - bedroom, study, kitchen, servants' quarters...
It's even more exciting to see that  our plan is looking quite sensible. 
We have discovered only one design fault so far, and that's to do with the doggy door. It's a tad high. And when I say that it's a tad high, I really mean that our whippet, Olive, will need to take up pole vaulting if she wants to let herself in and out of the laundry. Or we could install an itty-bitty doggy escalator. Which could be quite fun. Although a little unusual.

We're getting to know the neighbourhood. We've tramped along country lanes, ogling dead trees - they might make good firewood one day soon! We've waded across grassy paddocks, spotting flame robins and pardalotes. And a few weeks ago we went for a hike around Mount Alexander. It's glorious - granite boulders, fern trees, towering gums, rock wallabies and stunning views across the central Victorian landscape.
'Spotto! There's our house!'

We're enjoying the seasonal changes - the golden-grey grass greening up as the weather cools down, the ewes giving birth to fresh white lambs, the cows growing their fluffy winter coats, the chilly days where the fog hugs the hilltops until noon,  the port-a-loo listing to one side as the winter rain turns the soil to mud.

We have a growing cache of friends in our new neighbourhood - salt of the earth locals and fellow paddock-changers like ourselves. And there are rumours of other fascinating folk dwelling amidst the granite rocks, who we will surely meet one day - the one-eyed water diviner, the fully sighted cheese-makers and the nudist.

But best of all is the aaaaah-moment that we experience every time we step out of the car and set foot on our soil.
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, look at that view!'
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, free from suburbia!'
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, smell that fresh country air with a slight essence of manure.'
'Aaaaah,' as in, 'Aaaaah, the dream is becoming reality.'

On top of our hill, breathing in the fresh country air and looking
out for friendly cheese-makers and water diviners that might be
 scuttling between the he rocks.
Having a cuppa in the study.
Solid walls and ceiling still to come, but the floor
and the vision is there.