De-cluttering

The weather being what it was, we spent a lot of time inside this week. Kids and dogs being what they are, I also spent a lot of time trying to keep things from falling into complete chaos. Engaged in this futile task, I realised that many things in this house were strangers to me. I couldn't really recall how they came to be here and I had absolutely no idea how to put them away. Worse, it seemed these things rarely travelled solo. Rather, we had collectives, packs, tribes, communities of clutter, living out their aimless days in poorly constructed stacks, piles and sheafs. I found myself walking from room to room, looking for suitable accomodation for boxes of batteries that may or may not have any life in them, what seemed like hundreds of envelopes stuffed with 'important' papers, hand me down clothes that Martha never quite fitted into, two fit balls for that Pilates we are always intending to do, articles ripped out of newspapers and magazines for unspecified future reference, endless roughly drawn schematics of kitchens and gardens that someone, at some time, imagined had captured one or another golden idea, brochures, instruction books for items that I was not even sure we owned, warranties, strange pieces of miscellaneous giftware accrued over many birthdays and Christmases, seed packets, plastic containers that had long ago parted company with their lids, extraneous lids that no longer matched any containers or jars, endless bunny rugs...the list goes on. What to do with it? What if I threw it all out then one day needed a spare battery? What if one of my sisters has a/another baby? Won't they need all these baby clothes?

The longer we were stuck indoors the more I longed for the spartan clarity of a Danish cabin where everything was either essential or beautiful, where everything had its place. Or at least an appropriate storage solution. I flicked through an old Ikea catalogue, unearthed in one of our ancient piles, and dreamed of Pax's and Traby's and Expedit's. I contemplated lock up storage. Perhaps I could work a few more hours to offset the cost? Then, out of desperation (or perhaps it was just procrastination), I googled 'clutter'. And this is what I found. I had a clutter epiphany. 'Organisational giant' Peter Walsh pointed out something so perfectly obvious I'm embarassed that I had to learn it from Unclutterer.com: 'respect the limits that your physical space places on you. There is only so much stuff that can come into your home before it is a place that you don't want to be, regardless of how fabulous your storage solutions may be. Figure out what kind of environment you want, figure out those physical limits and that's it - don't ever allow stuff to exceed those limits' (I'm paraphrasing here). Aah.

I want our house to feel calm and contemplative. I want it to encourage ease of movement and action (doing one thing shouldn't involve the cleaning up or relocation of another). I want it to be simple, yet full of meaning to those who live here, I want there to be care in the details. I want everyone to know where everything is. I want to wake up in the morning and pad out to the kitchen to drink my tea and feel the sun on my face without having to clear a space at the kitchen table. We filled boxes, and boxes, and boxes. We emptied drawers, and bins, and folders. We cleared under beds , on tops of cupboards, behind doors, and most importantly, surfaces. We drove it to St Vinnies, we burned and we recycled. Now that we had arrived at our 'limit', a kind of clutter detente, I extracted commitments from every member of the household: from now on, nothing extra comes into the house without something else going out (that includes you, Bessie). I woke up this morning, and even though it was rainy and grey, it felt good. Very good. Thank you, Mr Walsh. You are an organisational giant.

The start of something?

The tension between Bessie and Rhumba has begun to ease. We think they even played together for a bit today (well, there didn't seem to be any growling or cowering). Maybe they will be friends after all.

Whipping on by

Today seemed to end before it had even really started. Which, I think, is more good than bad given that some days seem to start and start and start, and never seem to get close to ending without the aid of alcohol. Let's hope there aren't too many of those days ahead, now that our last bottle of red wine has been regretfully, but most enjoyably, consumed. I started with a long and exceedingly optimistic list as I always do. Burdening myself with unrealistic expectations is my personal equivalent of a nicotine habit, just as hard to kick, but probably just as perversely pleasurable. Look, this long, long list, so full of anticipation and energy. So much energy! SO much energy. Oh, yeah, did I say...energy? The list has got a lot longer since we've commenced our frugality drive (can you drive towards frugality?). And needless to say quite a few of the items make it onto the next day's list. I don't mind about that. I need to start the day with a long list! But today, I did get my work done before lunchtime, I did wash the nappies and I did bake bread, for the sixth day in a row. Good, huh! (There is, unfortunately, an inverse law of bread consumption when it comes to the home baked stuff. The more you bake it, the more they eat it, great big thick hunks of it. Which means by 3pm, we are usually out of bread. I now absolutely understand why sliced bread would have seemed like the best thing since, well... )


This afternoon was spent moseying around nurseries and pretending not to know Martha while she assiduously excavated the sawdust from the rootballs of the bare rooted fruit trees. I absolutely love the bare root fruit tree season. I find a similar pleasure in looking through all those burnished bare twigs, fruiting spurs, colourful swing tags and tangles of roots as reading through a good recipe book. The anticipation and promise of nourishment and all manner of sensory pleasures, where key ingredients are never forgotten and codling moth flies overhead to next door's trees. The nurseryman predicted rain for tonight, and confidently declared 'kernels' to be a particular variety of almond tree. We walked away with a bundle of autumn fruiting raspberry canes, twenty strawberry runners, a Smyrna quince and a lot of sawdust in our shoes. We will try and plant them tomorrow. After that rain, of course.

On the way home, we could see from back up the road that Rob's cows had staged a mass breakout...into our front paddock. I remembered that walking past them yesterday, I had noticed a covetous gleam in their eye as they mooed at me over the fence. So, we continued up to Ross's (he is looking after the cows while Rob and Cathy are overseas) to let him know. Mark walked off to find him, and I tried to show Martha Ross's pigs. They were proper storybook pigs, white with black spots and big rings in their noses, having a great old time in the leafmould under an old, old oak tree. I admit they were rather loud pigs, and quite large as well, but I have never seen Martha so terrified. Every time the pigs snorted or snuffled she absolutely shrieked and couldn't even bring herself to look at them. Risk averse, like her mother.

By the time cows were sorted and chooks and dogs fed, it had become one of those nights where dinner must be conjured rather than cooked. So... pasta with anchovies and freshly picked broccolini from the garden and absolutely delicious it was.

Eleven minute pasta with broccolini and anchovies

Put pasta water on to boil. In a pan, saute three or four cloves of garlic and three or four anchovies in a generous slosh of olive oil until anchovies have 'melted'. Add some pine nuts.
Slice broccolini lengthways into thin florets and cook for a minute in the boiling pasta water (i.e. with the cooking pasta) then scoop out and stir into the anchovy mixture. Drain pasta, toss through the anchovy mixture. Serve with parmesan. Yum.

Taking stock

It has been a strange, and sad, week without our lovely Archie-boy. Kris said, beautifully, that losing a dog is so hard because they are 'part of how our families knit together and how we practice love and happiness in them'. This has been so true for us. However, sad as Mark and I are, the greatest loss is really Bessie's. She and Archie were such close and loving companions - Archie really understood just what a strange dog Beebs is and totally embraced that. He went along with her weird idiosyncratic games (including the infamous Hump-matic), one eyebrow ever quizzically raised in a lovely, knowing aside to us. He patiently endured her barking...and barking...and barking... until he could stand it no longer, handing over whatever it was that she wanted (a bone, a game, a particular place in the sun) and disappearing under the house for a for a bit of quiet and a nice lie down. He knew that she needed to sleep on the bed with us - no problem, he was quite happy with his spot in front of the fire. Most of all, he just understood that she was Bessie, and that was OK. But Archie is gone, and Rhumba is here. And from Rhumba's perspective, being Bessie is just not OK. We're not sure what to do. Do we stick it out for another week, hoping these two miserable dogs will find some way to be happy together? Do we take Rhumba back and hope and hope that she finds someone else to love her? Do we get a third dog? This is sounding like a choose-your-own-adventure but you get our dilemma. I wish dogs could talk. I'd really appreciate their advice on this one.


Perhaps in part because everything has felt so unsettled and illfitting this week, we also found ourselves embarking on a general stocktake of 'where we are at' with money, work and dreams and to what extent these intersect with reality, responsibility, and general adult-ness. We discovered that in our case it is less an intersection than a dusty, potholed, kind of scary looking cul-de-sac of dingy looking houses with no letterboxes. Reality and responsibility, as I know them, anyway, don't live here just now. So, things are going to change. Basically, income must go up, expenses must (somehow) come down. This is always a pretty intimidating topic of conversation, especially when parenting is in the mix, and the last few times we tried it it was kind of messy and inconclusive. But now, I think we're getting somewhere. A new job direction for Mark (going 'back on the tools': I always loved him in a King Gee work shirt), a shift in working style for me (less work, but hopefully more evenly distributed over the month) and best of all, finally, a commitment to at least trying to be self sufficient. Sadly, we also agreed that that lovely, restorative, relaxing and probably life span enhancing glass of red each night had to go, as do the disposable nappies, the second car, the mobiles, and chocolate. I have committed to baking all our bread (I used to, before Martha, so am hopeful I can find it in me to do this again), shopping with the utmost thriftiness and spinning up some of those dusty old fleeces rather than buying any more gorgeous and delectable yarn with which to make elegant yet slightly eccentric knits for me and my daughter that will tranform us into paragons of style. Which of course I have never actually done, so I guess this is more of a virtual saving. I will miss it though. We already do live basically from the garden although we do buy some staples (potatoes, carrots, bananas). It does mean that our diet can at times be quite constrained (at the moment, it's all about eggs, chard, parsley, lemons, rocket and celery) particularly if I'm not in an imaginative or inventive cooking mood (um, savoury mince anyone?) however this is a trade off that we're more than prepared to make. It means we can eat good quality food that is not permeated with fungicide or pesticide that costs us less than poor quality food that is. The challenge is to get more variety for more of the year, and to ensure that we can keep up a constant supply of the staples. I can't wait to expand the garden and orchard - plans are already afoot. I am looking forward to frugality. Although, a glass of wine would taste good with that.

Digging.

On Saturday we dug a new bed in the vegetable garden. With our backs in the tentative winter sun, watched over by Archie and Bessie, we dug and dug through the compacted soil, tossing rocks aside, and imagining the lush crop of basil and parsley that would grow here in the spring.


On Sunday we dug a grave for our beautiful 'big boy'. The wind was cold, and spiced with icy rain. We dug and dug through the compacted soil, tossing rocks aside, and contemplating, through our tears, just how sad and empty life was going to be without him.