Had it been someplace cool and green like England, we could have left the paddocks to nature and created a wildflower meadow. That is simply not doable here in Australia where the local shire council mandates a cut-back of any grass that is over a few inches high due to the risk of bush-fires. It is a firm but sensible approach to keeping people alive and I completely agree with it. But it also means that Mark spends hours on a tractor when he would rather be engaging in something artistic or creative. He misses that free time to just let the muse weave spells in his brain and I have longed to give that freedom back to him.

So we signed the listing contract with our new agent last week, the sign went up on Thursday, and the listing went live online today at realestate.com.au.

It’s a beautiful little gem of a house and it’s perfect for a full time resident OR for a weekender property — and the huge art studio makes it quite desirable. The combined size of the cottage-sized house and the art studio make it all bigger (and more sensible given that we have no children in residence) than our previous 3 bedroom, 2 story house down in Melbourne. So now we just wait for the right person to come along and we begin the sorting out process.

And what lies ahead? What kind of house would we like next? As much as we never thought we’d say this, I think we’ll settle for a bog-standard sized lot this time and we’ll look for a nice-ish house to rehab. Then we’ll plant our garden and fruit trees and know that we might actually have the time to get on the train and go into the city for a trip to the theatre or museum without getting too far off schedule back at the property.

Dreams of rural living are one thing — the reality is quite something else — especially when you have two creative and artistic people living under one roof and neither of them wants to sacrifice the creative hours to maintenance issues.

Ah well — live and learn!

According to the directions on each huge carton of bamboo flooring, we were meant to install it over a padded foam underlay via a nail-through-the-tongue-end method. And so my husband, who renovates houses for a living and who has never installed a timber floor without both gluing it and nailing it, did exactly what the manufacturers instructed. And they were wrong, wrong, wrong on so many levels!

We moved into our new house almost exactly one year ago and those pale blond floors were a source of visual joy — joy that began to be seriously squashed when the ‘issue’ first appeared prior to Christmas. At first it was simply a little squeak sound in a few places in the living-room. Then it progressed to a more serious set of crackles in the bedroom. And by the time we decided that enough was enough, my husband said that if I got up in the middle of the night to take an aspirin or get a glass of water, he knew exactly where I was in the house by the series of sounds. Not acceptable!

Research queen that I am, I did a web search and discovered that it was a ‘known issue’ with bamboo flooring and there were anguished letters from owners of houses much larger than ours who were moaning on public forums about the snap-crackle-pop effect of simply walking from room to room. Our house is tiny and what we have just gone through was inconvenient, but most of these news-group writers were discussing huge houses that had been constructed in an eco-conscious manner with sustainable materials — the same reasoning we used in our choice of materials. I can only imagine the stress of having to uninstall and reinstall the acres of flooring in those houses!

Thus we have now gone through construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction — all in the space of a mere 13 months time period. Aaarrrggghhh!

A week ago, Mark began pulling up every single piece of timber flooring throughout the house.

But prior to that little endeavor, we had to move every stick of furniture out and into the addition that was completed in February, a wing on the back of the house that we had (thank heavens!) tiled instead of using the bamboo flooring again. And there we have camped out for well over a week while he removed the floor and reinstalled it with toxic-smelling, gag-inducing adhesive.

The clean and tidy addition went from this shot below
to the next two. Aarrgghh!

Expeditions were made on occasion to the kitchen or the bathroom, but the rest of the time was spent eating, sleeping, doing office work, and watching television in a 30 square metre space. At least we both had a sense of humour about it all.

Now we can reassemble the house tomorrow and enjoy strolling boldly across the blond floors. But I can almost guarantee that, for awhile at least, we will hold our breath each and every time we hear a creak, groan, or noise anywhere within these walls.

Winter is at hand — a mere few days away now — and already our temperatures are hovering near zero each night. The winter-ish wardrobe has been brought out of the closets once again and wool socks are definitely one of the daily necessities now.

In an annual reprise of my life-long pattern of winter behaviour, I have settled happily into a very creative space once again. Cuddled up in the aforementioned woolly socks and other soft and slouchy clothing, my brain is bursting with writing ideas and straining at the need to get at least some sleep in each 24 hour period when all I want to do at times like this is arise, gulp down hot coffee or endless cups of tea, and then write-write-write for as many hours as I can hold my eyes open per day.

It is a return to the fruitful darkness — the time when the seeds of future growth sit and percolate quietly in the colder temps, darker days, longer nights. I usually do my best writing at this time of year when that hot and all-too-bright Australian summer is no longer stunning my brain cells into inactivity. Another blessing is that I have never been affected, as many of my friends seem to be, by SAD — Seasonal Affected Disorder — where they crave the sunlight or need to supplement the lack of it with colour-corrected indoor lighting that simulates sunlight.

It is a very personal issue for this former resident of the Northern Hemisphere and I know that these sentiments are not universally felt by others who have fled the icy snow-filled winters and migrated here from Europe or North America or Northern Asia, but I feel more alive in these particular months than I ever do during the sun-parched ones. The leaves may have fallen from the trees and most of the plants are moving into dormancy, but we have one very particular thing right now that we don’t have most of the year.

Green — the colour of growth and renewal and, to my heart at least, hope. I truly miss the all-year-round shades of green in the Northern Hemisphere — so this colder, darker, greener, cuddlier-cozier time of year simply sets my heart alight and my brain is recharged and ready to write once again.

Wherever you may be in the world — may YOU feel similarly inspired right now!

I can happily announce that a story was submitted and accepted for a regional anthology of writing which will be published in August 2010, but unfortunately that’s about it on the flying-fingers front.

Apologies to my regular readers and no, nothing is amiss. We have been quite busy with hearth and home issues as we continue the refinements on this less-than-a-year-old cottage on our small farm in Australia.

I shall be back soon — I promise — with new photos and new areas of musing for one and all to ponder.

I’ve read several articles in the last 3 or 4 years written by the youngest adults around — the early 20s folks who are facing quite a different world than the one we emerged into after university, fresh-faced with hope and the sensation that we could be anything that we wanted to if we applied ourselves diligently. And of course we all simply knew without questioning that we would own our own homes quite quickly. That world frequently doesn’t exist for today’s emerging adults — and there is a growing resentment about that accompanied by quite a bit of finger pointing.

The global epidemic of financial and personal pessimism isn’t limited to the young though. Even amongst people who are middle-aged or older, I personally know of quite a few adults who have been wiped out financially by the last recession and who have lost their homes and jobs. I also have both friends and family members who are retired folks that conscientiously set aside money during their years of employment for month after month, year after year, only to retire and discover that the longed-for pension was now worth 50% or less of what they had put in. They might as well have set those US dollars or British pounds alight in a bonfire. Or even better, they might have had rather a lot of holidays that they postponed in the belief that they would do all of that once they were ‘safely’ retired with lots of time on their hands.

What concerns me about articles like What On Earth Is To Become Of The Next Generation is that the young writer, viewing the daunting and diminished prospects that his generation faces with clarity and a fortunately-moderated anger, still engages in stereotypes that simply do NOT apply to all of us who are over 45.

I will cite examples from my own life, but I know many similar stories from friends aged 40s through 70s. When our children were growing up, we baked our own bread, canned or bottled our fruits and veg (whether we grew them ourselves or bought them at the market stalls), we travelled frugally and drove economical vehicles. And I recycled cans and bottles back in the early 1970s when my children were small and they teased me about it. Those same children are now marvelously responsible and sensible adults in their 30s who live the SAME way. Many more of us than you could imagine continue to live lightly on the Earth in an attempt to reduce the burden of our actions on those that follow us. And no, we are not the Porsche-driving, yacht-navigating, trust-fund-wearing, 2nd-and-3rd home-owning spenders that we are all portrayed as in most articles about the Boomer Generation.

There is a tiny proportion of wealthy adults who fit the stereotypes that are discussed in the article that I link to above and those people are frequently the movers-and-shakers who got the WORLD into this economic, social, and environmental mess through their rampant greed, disregard for planetary assets, and desire to pad their own bank accounts.

Here’s a suggestion for the disillusioned youth. Why not join forces with us shocked and hard-working-yet-financially-diminished older folks and see what kind of Revolution For Good that we can create if we work together and cease any sniping at one another.

If we sincerely had some resolve and courage, what government in the world is going to survive if huge waves of angry people rise up and say aloud, “Enough is ENOUGH!” Angry taxpayers, angry and unemployed young folks, people who have lost their jobs and their homes, pensioners who can barely survive, war-veterans who were promised care after they did their patriotic duty — angry, angry, angry people are sick of feeling put upon, lied to, and taken advantage of. It doesn’t take my psychic senses to tell me that there is a rippling current that is about to explode into a shower of sparks and we need to find ways now, not down the road in a few months or years, to work together to find ways to take care of one another no matter what our age or circumstances.

The young writer of the linked article is correct. Many of his generation will never own a home or be adequately employed and of course they have the right to be agitated about those limitations on their lives. But take the time to listen to the older folks who feel distinctly ‘sold out’ by the governments of various countries and the global financial markets. And perhaps join together, work together, walk arm-in-arm in the streets in protest TOGETHER!

This may be an essay worth expanding at a future date with more ideas about living sustainably in a world that has shrinking resources — so I will be curious to see what, if any, feedback I receive. I always welcome commentary from friends — but I would also like to hear from others who usually read my columns and then quietly move on without commenting. What do YOU think about possible solutions to this global epidemic of pessimism about the future?