Nourish Me

slightly worse

Matt came by on Saturday morning, pulled up in his hulking truck to show us how to properly use a chainsaw. He's one of those people it's hard not to really like and as he was trying to avoid going car shopping (groan), we ended up chatting at length. Being both an arborist and a CFA volunteer, he had some interesting, nay terrifying, things to say about how trees are falling over as they halve their root systems due to drought and (the CFA bit) about the run up to fire season. An old bloke he knows who keeps reams of weather records told him that conditions, this year, are slightly worse than they were back in '82. Yep, that'd be Ash Wednesday, people.  

So, this is a little ritualistic sort of reminder to myself, and maybe you, to give thanks to the CFA for the skilled work they do.     

feral

11am. Changing trains at Richmond, heading down the tunnel that links platforms underground – built on a visually distracting angle, tiles an unnaturally lit shade of blue – I think about how out of place I feel in the urban world most days. Am reading Feral: Rewilding The Land, Sea and Human Life by George Monbiot. It seeps into my thinking and it is extraordinary. This mind feels very, very open. 

The past 18 months have taught me much. Old connections have been reforged through werk, all the better for my absence, to be sure. I needed to go away and grow up. Genuine new friendships as an adult are hard to come by, but I have been offered 2 in the past 6 months. The first a fellow cook, a beautiful and very female soul, the other a fledgling connection, an artist described by a critic in a catalogue of a recent-ish solo show of his as a poet of nature. A poet of nature. My heart feels full.   

The city's not so bad afterall, but I still long, most days, for the feral, for the wild places of my childhood. 

 

new

Conversations about renovating are dull, this I know.  My own internal conversation around it - mostly, will they just hurry up and be finished already? - bores even me, thus the lack of discussion about the beast here. Then last week I got a roll of film back and found some things that made me particularly happy.   

Pictures can offer a more immediately understandable story than words, especially with things that change visually, so, here's some of what's been taking up a lot of my thinking for the past three and a bit months. Our living room was small and dark, no space for a dining table. As someone who likes to cook, this was, of course, a travesty. The light extending has allowed in is revelatory. Eating at a long table is just as good as I suspected it would be, but the thing I like most, surprisingly, is that when people visit - even neighbours who've known the house for decades - no-one can't quite tell, from the outside, what has changed. Subtle is good, no? 

Floorboards will be polished this week and then, at long last, this space is mine. Cannot wait to get back to routine, back to working and planning in the garden, back, indeed, to my life.