Time for a little maintenance about the Secret Garden; time for some restoration of its ageing houses: time for Handy Andy to work his magic...
To undercoat my new picture railing before it replaces the old...
To remount broken and missing fragments of iron lace...
To tackle the rampant cocksfoot...
And replace missing guttering around the tiara.
A man with an eye for finishing detail;
little improvements and necessities everywhere he worked over the past ten days.
But, lest all work and no play dulled the man, we celebrated Andy's birthday with a walk on Mt Grey, where we found a character building of different ilk to my collected houses. A tiny possum trappers' hut, rudimentary inside, but with a sophisticated shingle-like cladding of tin cans. Andy traced
the embossed lettering, since all traces of paint had disappeared, and made out the words Plume Motor Oil.
Refreshing for me to have had a man about the house; to get things done which otherwise daunt me, to jog my memory and challenge my habits, to open my eyes to new possibilities...
I hope he can return.
Cocksfoot Dactylis glomerata
6 comments:
The house looks great, I suspect you will be having a grand opening long before we do...love the tiara, but I bags dibs on the possum hut!
Thankyou Sag. I must say I was looking forward to sheltering from the rain with a hot cuppa, but the possum hut was utterly uninviting inside. After I had slid over in a muddy puddle Andy poured me a hot cuppa under the shelter of the trees with a spectacular view over a deep gorge - have you ever been up there? We could fit the possum hut and Pegasus Bay winery into one afternoon... Oh and the tiara - now is the time to design one into your new home!
Is Handy Andy available for hire? I could find a few pre-winter garden jobs for him to do if he has a spare afternoon or three...?
World-wide demand! You two would get along well. I just know it :-)
But where are all the possums ??? And where was the possum hunter ? There are possums in NZ ? I thought they were pretty much an American phenomenon. Marsupials with the most amazing tails. So this is the tin clad building you had referred to earlier ? Hmmm, I wonder how the inside is ? Just enough space for a bed and a table ?
Oh, and many, many thanks for your continuing comments on posts from the distant foggy past. Glad you enjoyed my grandmother's paintings. Some folks thought she had a certain amount of talent... You really are the first person who had gone back into those archives and actually left a comment or two... I know I'm getting some page hits on older posts due to various Google searches that people do that lead them to the blog, but they never leave comments. So, really, heartfelt thanks...
PS watch out for that Saj, she'll drink you out of house and home...
:-)
I look up at Mt Grey today and there is snow, where we walked in the rain six days ago. The NZ possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) were introduced from Australia. Being Me, on Sunny Side Up, has just blogged sadly from Melbourne about one caught in power lines, but here they quickly became a destructive pest of our native forests - hence the trappers, who are still very much part of our culture. But the old hut is now only 20 mins or so from a road and has lost any home comforts it may have had. There's just a damp earth floor inside a windowless tin box.
Yep, I have got as far as a photo of you! And a comely stone wall, and it occurs to me that one could keep revisiting favourite blogs, with new comments as time provokes new responses. Time! It would be nice to comment on every post. I do think that if people realised that blog comments feed through in present time, rather than sitting chronologically back there, more might comment when they come across old posts during internet searches. Maybe this will be my contribution to the Blogosphere, to get more people commenting across time!
Would you believe that in our one brief meeting, in her motel, The Saj and I drank tea together! I'm looking forward to one great progressive house warming party over the next couple of years as everyone's houses get back on their feet so to speak. The shakes do seem to have lessened in intensity if not in frequency. I don't think anyone in Canterbury is quite ready to accept that it is all over yet. Thanks for your thoughts... and visiting!
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