18 posts tagged “home”

That I am in fact still here.  I don't have an ergonomic computer setup at the moment so I'm not doing much typing, lots of surfing, but no typing.

In my virtual absence, life has been going along quietly here.  It's spring and the rhododendrons are blooming.  Petra and I walk round our garden most mornings looking at the flowers.  I haven't had a garden for 10 years and had forgotten the deep satisfaction to be had from pottering amongst the plants even in a garden as tiny and down at heel as ours.  70-odd years worth of over-ambitious gardeners have crammed it to bursting with too many, too big, too close together trees and shrubs.  Our gardening efforts so far have been very Costa Rican - we've taken to the bushes with saws, loppers, and secateurs, and have removed three trees so far.  And I plot further destruction in my walks with Petra - she smells flowers while I pick shrubs for the chop.  All the camellias and a couple of sad-looking rhododendrons are on my condemned list, and I plan to prune the hell out of the remaining rhododendrons next autumn.

    

We have a leak in our library room.  It used to be a sun porch, but was closed in sometime in the 40's, making a kind of lean-to room.  The pitch of the roof isn't quite steep enough for the heavy concrete tiles up there  and water is inclined to pool in the ceiling and drip through any weaknesses it finds.  We discovered this problem the hard way, during the last big storm - water poured through the ceiling in disconcerting quantities.

After a couple of abortive attempts to get roofing contractors to turn up when they said they would, we turned to one of mum's friends - Ray the builder.  He came around this morning and began tearing out the water-damaged ceiling tiles.  He uncovered a nasty smell, two very chewed pink batts (batts are fibreglass insulation material), a plastic bag which had been pressed into service as a nest, lots of rat droppings, and one very dead rat.  Yuck!  Ray told me what he'd found and I hid at the other end of the house until he'd moved everything into the rubbish bin.

He also discovered a hole in the building paper, made by a long ago electrician who wanted to feed wiring into the room.  Both the rat and the water probably made their way into our ceiling this way.

I wonder what else is up there, nothing more than spiders I hope. 

Ceiling spaces in old houses can be very organic places.  I hired an electrician recently who had to climb into the ceiling to fix a mis-wired light.  He spoke feelingly about the spookiness of climbing into the ceilings of old houses.  His method is to use a very dim torch on the theory that what he can't see won't hurt him.  That works for spiders and other such creepy crawlies, but didn't do him much good in one ancient villa where he came face to face with a possum.  Possums are as big as a big cat and grumpy, so he got the hell out of the way.  I don't think I'll be going exploring up in our attic space any time soon.  We don't have possums, and probably no live rodents because we'd hear them if we did, but the possibility of little scuttling mammals, along with the certainty of the big local spiders is enough to keep me well away.  

I haven't yet figured out how to be a blogger now that I'm back in Dunedin.  Costa Rica was exotic for me; I was a stranger in a strange land and the most mundane of activities brought with it the possibility of adventure.  But now I'm home, and home is just home.  I arrived here, moved into my house, and sank into a kind of wordless contentment with no blogging, no journalling and not even much emailing. 

I love being here.  I have little spurts of happiness at odd moments - when I look at my freshly painted and varnished, newly flat-ceilinged, and spring-cleaned lounge, when I drive through the Dunedin streets looking at lovingly restored villas and at native trees and shrubs, when I visit the beach or the Otago Peninsula, when I hang out in the familiar cafes and shops, when I spend time with family.  But I don't know how to write about it.

Our Canadian stuff finally arrived today - 4 months after we sent it from Vancouver.  I missed my books and all the little bits and pieces I'd collected up, so I'm very pleased to see them again.  However, I'm pretty pissed about the state they turned up in.

The moving company hadn't repacked anything - all my fragile treasures and the kitchen breakables were still in the boxes I'd put them in before we moved to Costa Rica.  And while my packing - I'd wrapped everything in paper and stowed it in boxes - was fine for a move across town, it wasn't at all adequate for a two-month container-ride across the world.  As a result, quite a bit of stuff was broken.  Even worse, some things don't appear to have made it into the boxes at all.  A couple of big vases with lots of sentimental value have vanished leaving not a shard in their wake. 

I'll be phoning Quinn LaPorte tomorrow to tell her just how unprofessional I think they've been and to find out how to make an insurance claim.

I imagined coming to New Zealand and gathering all my things around me after years of having my life scattered all over the world.  It hasn't worked out the way I'd hoped though.  Most of the things I left behind in New Zealand have fallen victim to the damp and mould in my mother's garage, and now I've lost more valuables.  Looks like I'll be starting over here instead of recapturing my past in the way I expected.  Maybe that's not a bad thing, to move forward instead of looking backwards.  But I'm not yet resigned to my losses.

Renovations drove us from our home last Friday.  This time it was the smell of oil-based paint that forced us out.  My long-suffering sister kindly put up with us messing up her house and taking over her bedroom for the week.  The paint smell still lingers but we just had to come home today so that we can start living our lives again.

The freshly painted walls and newly plastered ceilings look fabulous though which makes the annoyances, and the time and expense, worth it.  In fact, now that we've started, I can see a whole lot of other things I'd like to do to make the house beautiful.  But I'm restraining myself because we want to live here in peace for a while and get properly settled. 

It's a warm, calm Monday afternoon in Dunedin. 

Petra's napping.

Travis and I have just used my shiny new secateurs to prune the vines growing over the end of the deck.  And now Travis is in the bathroom knocking on walls as he prepares to put up a towel rail using his new Christmas drill.  I've hung out washing on the clothes line so that it can dry in the sun.  And I'm about to unpack one of the suitcases we still have lurking around in our cupboards.

Since we moved in, we've been reading home decorating magazines and having satisfying conversations about rearranging the kitchen and painting the lounge, tearing out old fixtures and choosing furniture.  Home ownership is absorbing.  I'm scheming house schemes in the way that I usually scheme travel schemes.

Our lawn hasn't been mowed for a couple of weeks so it's covered with daisies and dandelions.  It's pretty in an unruly way and makes a good backdrop for pictures, especially when the subject is a little girl wearing her best fairy dress.

We also took a few pictures of us more ordinary folk.  I have yet another cold and look pretty battered - everyone else is fine.  Petra insisted on wearing her woolly hat even though it was over 30 degrees here today.  She's very proud indeed that she can pull it on and off herself and wears it every chance she gets.

We moved into our house on Boxing Day.  We haven't unpacked yet and we've got the bare minimum of furniture - a bed, a sofa, dining table and chairs, computer desk and chair.  And the house is so big that I'm not quite sure where to go in it yet - I find myself loitering in corners.  But it's wonderful and exciting and strange to have such a fabulous house for our very own.  I can't quite believe that it's really ours, that I get to garden and choose paint, and scheme schemes about kitchen renovations.

We spent today loitering around arranging things in a desultory kind of way.  Travis got me a great Christmas present this year - a Canon Powershot SX110.  I haven't figured out to fly it yet, but I took a few pictures this evening.  It was a beautiful summer day here and the view from our deck and lounge showed to advantage.

We picked up the key to our new house on Friday morning and spent a satisfying afternoon wandering round the house, poking in all its nooks and crannies.  We still like it, so I'm done with all the "ohmigod we've just spent a gazillion dollars and what if the house sucks" angst.  Buying a house for the first time is a stressful process - I'm glad that we're done and are happy with our choice.

It's an odd experience to be back in Dunedin.  My past overlays everything.  I remember what I used to do, where I used to go, who I used to see.  But I don't have a present or a future here yet.

Travis, Petra and I went to buy a wireless router on our first full day here because it's something Travis can't live without.  The guy behind the counter quizzed us about what Dunedin is like for people who've come from the other side of the world.  "I'm from here," I said, "I can't tell."  He looked rather blankly at me and didn't answer.  I realised later that I didn't sound like a local to him; I sounded foreign.  My accent has flattened, my vowels have gone Canadian, and I have "r's" where no "r's" should be.  I'm no longer a native.

Going native is an almost invisible process.  I don't know how it happened in Vancouver; I didn't notice any change.  At some point retail staff and restaurant servers just stopped asking me how long I'd been there and whether I was enjoying my holiday.  When we visited last month, I still belonged there.  I slotted back into my usual life in the West End.  My days had the same shape that they used to have when I lived on Comox Street.  And the West End community is still there.  The barrista in Starbucks, the library staff, the people walking the streets, the post office ladies were all familiar to me and I was familiar to them.

This is no longer true of Dunedin even though I was born here.  I have to start at the beginning and build up a new lifestyle, a new day-to-day reality to replace my 10 year old memories of my old life here.  Living somewhere that is at once thoroughly familiar and disconcertingly new will be even more challenging than emigrating to a country that's unambiguously unknown.  You expect to be slightly askew in a new country; you expect to know what's going on in your home country.

Here's a poem about alienation and belonging that my friend Karen sent to me.

In my country (Jackie Kay, 1993, Other Lovers)

Walking down by the waters
down where an honest river
shakes hands with the sea,
a woman passed round me
in a slow watchful circle
as if I were a superstition;
or the worst dregs of her imagination,
so when she finally spoke
her words spliced into bars
of an old wheel. A segment of air.

Where do you come from?

"Here," I said. "Here. These parts."