Spoke to my niece today , she is surrounded by water, floods have cut yamba off and so she misses school, said she was a bit bored, got me thinking about a time when we lived in Devon , the snow came on christmas day, how thrilling , white christmas! the snow kept coming, then it froze, trees were creaking under the weight, had to climb out a window to remove it from around the door to open it . The scene outside was beautiful for someone from oz . Cranked up the central heating and went to the picture perfect Woolfardisworthy pub with husband and toddlers for lunch, the boy and girl. Everyone was in jovial christmas snow mood, then the power went out ......We had one fireplace in the very large lounge that used to be a cow byre, but of course the wood was under snow, frozen solid by now. So husband had the job of getting some of it indoors, and me the great fire maker spent a lot of the day trying to do just that, eventually I did get it going .
So that word again ..boredom seemed to be attacking the boy and girl. Husband, electrical draughtsman who should know about this stuff, rigged up our tv to the car battery and with a very loud bang and a few startled screams the tv was cactus. What is it about tradesman, when it comes to working on their own stuff all commonsense seems to fly away. Came close to being electrocuted a couple of nights ago when I chased an awful smell that had been hovering in the kitchen to the cooker, so husband removed the back as requested, and then left me to find the source of the smell , which I did poor dead mouse, almost touched it but decided to put rubber gloves on first while of course saying mantras for its future and hopefully better rebirth, just about to touch it again when the now not very popular husband he is one of the others mentioned the wires it was attached to were live, luckily for him his deafness muffled some of the most colourful language I used , language that he often asks if I picked up at the private boarding school I attended in south africa, which of course is not true, there was no way those sort of words could ever enter the cloistered environment we inhabited, no the words now in my vocab took me many years of our 33 year marriage to aquire and I might add as a direct result of it ! still not sure if he was trying to be rid of me, the one who expects a little help every now and then with the 2 dogs, 5 cats, 8 hens, 2 fish, nearly an acre of rainforest and grounds , pythons that insist on nesting in the chook house, gutters that often have leaves, very high gutters that the husband with menieres, a hearing disorder that causes at times dizziness and drop attacks cannot reach, so I have overcome my fear of heights, a good thing. and add to that chauffeur duty as he is unable to drive due also to menieres.
Back to Devon, our little village was completely cut off, so when thoughts of food returned we got what we could from the tiny village shop , and walked in this magnificent space with the trees creaking, to the mushroom farm and then the egg farm where the farmers wife asked if the girl and boy would like to see the animals. Of course they would, they always loved 4 legged creatures and had tiddles and tubs 2 kittens at home, will explain how they came to be part of the family later. The hens were in a barn with sheep and a cow and a couple of pigs, can only try to describe what the smell was like, at first confronting but as you got used to it, earthy and real and this warm fug and like life, some good notes and some absolutely not . My children are vegetarians and i think the first close up sight of all these lovely creatures that they had only seen in the distance before, huddling together for warmth, and me explaining what usually happens to farm animals may have had some influence in their decisions .(of course a big no no in the seventies when vegetarians were considered odd if not a little mad) thankfully open minded clever people accept vegeterianism today as a perfectly normal choice, however have still come across the others even today in this new century, but mad is not so bad, we all have some of that in us whether we admit it or not.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
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