Slipping Standards

I wasn’t always this disorganized. I didn’t always live on a paddock in the country. In fact, it was only when I moved lock, stock and barrel to New Zealand that my life changed irrevocably. I was happy about that at the time. Living in California after a major earthquake scare had lost its sheen. I’d been diagnosed with a serious illness and thought a complete change of scene would heal what ailed me. Little did I realize in my Pollyannish mentality, how much comfort I was giving up. Being close to all of my children and my two sisters and all the associated family meant more to me than going on an international adventure, uprooting myself, and our miracle son, Jake, to an unknown destination. But John was intent on living near his family. His folks were getting old and he’d been abroad for over two decades both in Europe and the States, which started out with a year stint in South Africa. These Kiwis love going abroad on their OE, as they say. That stands for Overseas Experience. They want to see the world and live life somewhere else. But he’d had enough. He wanted to simplify his life, to reconnect with a different way of doing everything and he was bringing his foolishly optimistic wife along with him.
For the first few years I didn’t know the ropes and I had no one to fall back on who could explain things to me, in a way I could understand. So, like always, I found out the hard way. The school of hard knocks isn’t an easy path to take but it does eventually lead to certain lessons about life in general and one’s life in particular.
A dear friend begged me to reconsider. She too had been born outside of the States from the union of her English mother and US soldier father, stationed there during the war. But her parents relocated back to America when she was little and eventually moved from the East Coast to sunny California. Janis kept telling me that quaint was fine for a visit but that I’d grow pretty tired of that life quickly. The United States was a beacon for opportunities and other countries just weren’t. Modern conveniences were few and far between. My life wouldn’t be as easy as I’d imagined aside from the extreme weather differences, culture, etc. I listened and thanked her for her concern and ended up doing what I intended to do anyway. I’d made up my mind to follow John and that was that. And so, we arrived on these shores after a couple of airplane flights, one very long and the other quite short. John’s parents lived in Christchurch and we stayed with them briefly then moved to his sister’s house, which was in the suburbs, as we looked for our own temporary accommodation. We’d bought a piece of land in a cooperative orchard property that had thousands of apple and apricot trees, but no house on it. Soon I found a small flat to stay in while we dithered about getting architectural plans for what to put on the orchard to live in. John was content to go along with what I wanted. I was the driving force for this, having given up my more luxurious life to live in his homeland. So, I took the reins on it gladly. Eventually a used house in the city turned out to be what we moved over to the site and I’d had it lowered onto the middle of the apricot block and built out from there. That humble abode was about the same size and the approximate age of the house we live in now. I don’t remember any closets in any of those rooms, but I think we might have had one in our bedroom, that we either enlarged or added from scratch. There was lots of scratch in that renovation but we kept the basic design features whenever we could. Like this cottage, it had two bedrooms and we completely redid the inside bathroom because originally the toilet was in the laundry room outside. Obviously, I couldn’t picture myself going out to do my business in the middle of the night or the middle of winter next to our washing machine. That was beyond quaint. That was archaic. We ended up lining the walls in that bathroom with baby (small gauge) corrugated iron in an olive tone with plenty of very used appliances, like our clawfoot tub, old copper toilet tank that hung on the wall with a chain flush and a very old-fashioned pedestal sink with appropriate taps on each side for hot and cold water rather than a modern one in the center. And we refinished all the rich wood floors in the whole house. In the small lounge we even installed an old fireplace that was retrieved from a demolished house. There was no way I could live surrounded by fruit trees on a paddock without a heat source of some kind and New Zealand homes are not noted for central heating.
We had no heat in our teeny flat and John used to tease me that he’d put on a video of a blazing fireplace to warm me up. All I did there was take endless baths to stay warm. It felt like he brought me to the Yukon. And I wasn’t prepared to freeze to death. So, I also put on layers of clothing, over long Johns. Not my most attractive period of adjustment from the sunny climes of California.
A front porch was added to give me a place to sit to admire the apricot trees from, with some fret work to tart up the entrance and we even found an antique front door with leaded glass that lent an air of significance to the plain Jane frontage it previously had. Then a deck off of the living room with a set of French doors leading to that and a small porch off of our bedroom behind that with another set of French doors and a garden was planted around the front mostly that started with a rustic arbor and lead with a curved pathway to our door. We were ecstatic to be living there finally, two years after we decided to emigrate. That garden was photographed in late autumn, after all flowers had gone to bed, for the New Zealand Gardener magazine in 1998. The photographer would have had much better subject matter had she arrived a month or two earlier, as we expected. The article was sweet and well written but I couldn’t convince the lovely photographer to take a photo or two inside the house, perhaps looking through the old original glass in the kitchen for better iconic images of the garden through the window. That same woman also photographed our Farmer’s Market at the Wineshed estate that I held on fine Saturday mornings, for another article in 2008, for the same publication. At that time, she was delighted to take any photos I wanted. The issue we were in came out just a few months before we lost our fight to stay on our property.
When our 40-foot container arrived from America, we housed most of our possessions in a shed. Although I stuffed in many of my treasures into the tiny house, many items just didn’t fit. The only room that had adequate storage was the kitchen that we’d rebuilt, only leaving the original coal range in an alcove where it remained after alterations were completed. That room was the heart of that house and I plonked our wormy chestnut planked vintage dining table in there in the center of the room and John hung a very delicate hand painted frosted glass-shaded light over it that my engineer father had made a fitting for years earlier. I still have that hundred and something year old fixture, that distinctive shade that hangs over the brass lamp, but it’s in a cardboard carton, well packed for its next house to hang in. It was too big for the available space here. There was no linen closet, no actual closet in the 2nd bedroom, no hall closet, or entry closet and only minimal shelving that our builders put up in the outside laundry area that they added to the side of the kitchen. That was it. So, I went from living in a gorgeous Spanish styled house in Agoura on one acre of land with cupboards in every room, built in bookcases, closets galore, a master bedroom with ensuite, (something I enjoyed in all of my houses prior to coming here) to my more spartan life here. And although our last house was situated at the end of a hilly climb, the last house on that road high up at the top with a panoramic view of the hills and dales for miles, we were still close to shopping, though in a suburb with a rural feel, away from the urban lifestyle. Anyway, to get to the point, there are newer houses here that have storage space but I don’t live in a new house and probably never will. I like the patina of aged beauties that seem to come back to life after I give them the once over. But saying that I must still admit that I miss the luxury of having room for all of my possessions. Miss having my dresses and jackets and blouses, tee shirts and pants hanging in a large closet, or folded neatly in cubbies inside a spacious closet with all my shoes and handbags and whatever else I own, stored neatly out of sight. Miss having a dedicated place for my endless sheet sets and duvet covers and the like. And mostly I miss having all of my stuff hidden away, where it doesn’t detract by being placed on the floor in baskets and hat boxes and whatever can hold them adequately, that end up collecting endless dust.
But the brunt of the issue for me is living off of a gravel road with gritty driveways and animals. Lots of animals. And because of that particular fact and being in a tiny house with no real storage my standards have slipped way down to ground level., where all the dirtiest dirt is. I’m not complaining about life on a paddock in farm country. In fact, I’ll probably look for a setting like this on the next property. But this one is on the lowlands and the road traffic sweeps a lot of dust and dirt over us that our animals bring inside. The cats roll around in it, the chickens take dirt baths to cool off in it and we walk in it in our gumboots.
I used to have a housekeeper come in once a week while I worked to support my kids when I was single. When I came home, my house was clean even though we had dogs and cats and kids tearing up the place and we actually kept it relatively tidy during the week. Here, it is so different because I am the housekeeper and I could spend every day just vacuuming and dusting or polishing but it’d still get dirty by tomorrow. So, I don’t bother most days. Just get by with minimal maintenance of the worst things that must be sanitary, like the dishes and the kitchen and the fridge and making the bed and keeping the bathroom messes cleaned up. Everything else is a bonus now. Besides, I’d rather be in the garden communing with my plants and pets. With an empty nest I am their comfort genie now. That beats endless housekeeping for me.
But like today, sometimes I look back on the way it used to be for me and what it is now. The scenery is magnificent in the most down-home kind of way. The views from here or from some of our other houses in New Zealand are pretty much unbeatable. But I’d probably stand on my head and spit nickels if my next place has room for my clothes and linens and bathroom potions and lotions. In the rather amorphous meantime, I will continue cleaning out boxes I put behind our daybed/sofa sometime last year when I had to empty out the office for a deep cleaning. Until today I hadn’t looked at those cartons stuffed with cutesy clips and animals and hand painted rocks that I made in another life in that other world I used to inhabit.