the small talking birds bring in the light. we try sleeping with our heads up the other end of the bed, leaving our toes with the inevitable draft that comes through our muded-up windows. I wake to pee in the black compost bucket and see the moon sitting just above the most distant trees, a hole-punch of orange in the otherwise dark world. it’ll be another day without rain. but our small tank is full, and we’ve the dam down in the dip of land. a big brown puddle one-quarter full. the two stone steps that once brought you into the water now lead you across a few metres of mud beforehand. benoit’s built another step, but we’ll need more if they’re to reach the water again.
we live in a small house. and it’s winter. not the same kind of winter that we had a few months ago. not a winter where the blue skies mean it’s minus zero. this is a southern hemisphere winter, an Australian winter, a rural Victorian winter.
we live on a small pocket of land that slopes down into gullies which run into the towns. there’s no frost up here. the earth is rocky and dry. a millimetre of topsoil form the build up of eucalypt leaves. the trees are spindly like young girls. they offer little shade. there’s not much of an understory. just the rocks that have been collected by someone before and thrown into piles or into small dividing walls. or lie otherwise untouched for who knows how long. when we pick them up we’re careful of the scorpions which are hibernating beneath. we’ve found the old vegie garden of a previous inhabitant and we’ve dug it up and fed it with manure and mushroom compost. we’ll wait until the spring to plant it out. in the meantime, for the winter greens, we’ve made a small circle garden closer to the house. we’ll see if the roots of roquette and minoza can compete with those of the eucalypts.
many people have lived in this house before. I think we’ll be the first to live here with a baby. it’s probably the perfect size for one simple person. there’s no space to collect things. we fold up the bed each day into this couch which I’m sitting on. our blankets collected into a basket which waits in the corner until evening, when we’ll unfold everything out again. we have a small table for breakfast and everything else. a camping stove, a pot belly, a 30 litre jerry can full of drinking water and two chairs. there’s no bathroom yet. there’s no toilet. there’s the strawberries and thyme, sage, mint and rosemary we’ve planted outside the door. and the big fire pit where we burn the old palates that have been left lying around. there’s the clearing where we park our car, and the chicken house we’re building for the 6 isa brown hens we’ll get and the australorpe rooster.
there’s the bush with the invisible boundaries that tell you who owns the land. but we ignore this detail and walk anywhere, believing that we may have a small house but we’ve the biggest garden you can find.
I don’t know how long we’ll be here. long enough to make it more beautiful. long enough probably for it to be hard to ever leave.
our last house was made of stone, and is some 20 000 kilometres away. we lived there for just one year. we dug up the earth and milked the goats and got married there. I tried to learn French there. the garlic and the broad beans we planted before we left have just been harvested by benoit’s family who recently visited and kept expecting us to appear, chasing the ducks out of the garden or leading the goats.
now we live in this house made of wood. there’ll never be any fences to allow us to keep milking goats. and the presence of dams spotted every few hundred metres means we can never get ducks. they’ll turn the stagnant water thick like stew with all their grime and cleaning. instead we’ll have the baby, and the sun and the spindly trees. we’ll have the easy language I know so well and rainwater and all the birds that wildcats haven’t killed. we’ll have the rocks and the clay and the free firewood and the horizon which we can see.
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