The shock of the new

There are changes afoot in my neighbourhood, which have brought my concerns about lost gardens and space to the fore. When we first moved to to our area, it was touted in the real estate literature as "bohemian south" (bohemian = run down rental properties), now it is "on the fringes of the city" or "a short walk to the Paris end of Charles St" (Paris end of Charles St = two cafes and a bakery, with seating outside, how European!). One by one the houses along the streets leading to ours are getting paint jobs and the ubiquitous new french doors + back deck combo. The overlooked spaces are disappearing under big houses with teeny tiny yards, and generally, there's a lot of people drawing down their housing equity to tart things up a little. It is not an over-statement to say I hate it.

I do admit this response is partly because I am curmudgeonly and suspicious of change. Also, I'm frugal and am not comfortable with people drawing down equity, which isn't real money - just possible profit - to transform their perfectly functional houses into boring sameness, pushing up my interest rates in the process. In part, I like my space, any old space, but especially that which holds mystery and delight within it, and find I this is fast disappearing.



In part, my concern is aesthetic - I like the humble, the tumbledown, the rough around the edges (Lu said to me yesterday, sounding concerned, "I don't want to move in to a dump, Mummy", which isn't as crazy as it sounds - each dump for me holds great possibility; Lu on the other hand, likes impersonal motels and stainless steel - these kids, always rebelling).



But there are other more symbolic and less personal issues informing my grumbling about the McMansions across the way.

Richard Sennett - a deeply under-rated sociologist, but aren't we all? - talks about the city as a place for encouraging tolerance. As we move through the space, confronted in a real way by difference, we learn to live with and indeed look for diversity in our lives. In a time of great social change, with ongoing debates about who 'we' let in, and what 'they' should believe, every day in cities we come across the Other, the stranger, and on the street they become people, transformed from the bogeymen on our imaginations and political rhetoric.

But others have pointed to the rise in gated communities, high front fences and underground carparks, drive throughs, the reliance on cars, and even ipods as indicators of our growing reluctance to face difference in our communities. We barricade ourselves from threat, discomfort, distaste, and in so doing we add to, rather than protect, ourselves from the fragmentation of our social worlds. If we unplugged our ipods and took a bus, the world would seem a lot less scary place.

I'm thinking the same things about how we treat our surrounds. I don't like the big houses with their high fences and paved or pebbled yards because they refuse to acknowledge any world but the one they have created in their boundaries. Things are hard edged, clear cut, with no blurring between inside and out, then and now, wild and tame.


For me, they are the architectural equivalent of the bubble world that hides us from social interaction; the bricks and mortar protects the inhabitants from acknowledging we share our space with others: present others, past others, and others who are not people at all.

Where I live, when flash new houses are built, a piece of the past is erased. The footprint of an old house is destroyed by the earth movers, the previous gardens trampled, and the needs of current creatures - the birds and bugs and furry things - are utterly denied.

It smacks of a disdain for the history of the place, and a discomfort with the messiness of our environment. Little Jenny Wren mentioned in my last post an old rose that has been destroyed as new flats go up - is it hard-heartedness or a lack of imagination that allows people to deny that which has gone before? We all want to make our lots our own - a woman's home is her castle after all, and her garden her realm - but there's a decided lack of co-operation in how we go about this.

I know in our busy, busy lives there's not much time for gardening, but why does this translate into no interest in our space and those who share it? And the time argument's a bit of a furphy anyway. As I walked by a new lot of lego houses, scowling and muttering, I saw the shell of an in-ground pool awaiting installation. I've had the misfortune of house sitting places with pools, and the skimming, chemical-ing and creepy-crawling take up far more time than my garden does, and for no great return. I also raised my eyebrow at the idea of an in-ground pool in a town where swimming is only very for the strong (or well-insulated) and in a state in drought. The rest of the yard covers its shame in pebbles and paving - all of which will require a lot of up-keep and weed-killer to keep the green bits at bay -


- and there's no inch given for the birds and the bees. But somehow, it's just fine to install one of the most unnecessary and environmentally useless domestic features currently available to home owners. It's enough to drive a scruffy, organic suburban householder to tears.

Crunch time

There's lots of research telling us women feel stressed when they combine work and family. These pressures are greater for women with more than one children, women with young children and women who work in the professions. I tick 'all of the above' and while I manage the difficulties as best I can, I am failing to do so, and everyday I feel as though I am failing a little more.

I don't want to complain. I make a good wage and my workplace is better than most. We have no real money troubles and we are healthy. Plus, there's not very much new to say about the time crunch, in my life or as a general proposition. But this morning, talking about insurance issues with Al over breakfast, I was interrupted by Lu who told me not to talk in 'that voice, that grumpy voice'. I hate that my children are picking up the edge to my voice, the one I try so hard and so unsuccessfully to soften.

Never once in my schooling did I recieve 'must try harder' on a report card. And now it runs in my head in a continuous loop. I know, I know, don't be so hard on myself, we can't have it all. I know all these things in theory and I agree. But how do I walk the talk? And is it ever okay to use that phrase, even while typing it with an ironic twist to my smile? And, come to think of it, is that in fact the saying?

My day in brief

FAAAAARRRRRRKKKKKKKKK!

Thank you for listening.

Update: two special Mummy drinks later and I'm starting to accept I have to go back to work tomorrow.

Beetlejuice

Last week, struggling under the first of the unit's simultaneous colds of the season, I stepped into the garden to cheer myself. And there among the sad, brown beans sat a colony of brand new bugs. I'm not sure what they are but they're garish, spotty, and they've got fluoro blood when they're squashed under my Thumb of Wrath - anything that tacky has got to be bad. But instead of doing something about them I stalked backed to the house in sniffling and snotty disgust.

The uninspiring site of the planned invasion

I garden organically and these aren't the first set of bugs that have tried to colonise the back. I'm getting kind of sick of their company and, as the thrill of the moral high ground starts to fade, I'm getting kind of sick of the whole organic thing as well. On bad days I feel the there's an awful lot of romanticism scattered like stardust about the literature. It might be desirable to 'share' with nature, knowing there's enough for all, but in my sad experience the birds, bugs, slugs and snails will eat everything, and without a single word of apology. I've had trees laden with apricots and taken about three, all green, because that's all the fruit that's been left to me. Slugs are best disposed by a gory tramp around a garden in the dark, and apparently gardeners can break the codling moth breeding cycle if they check the cycle of the moon and hunt at night. Call me old fashioned, but in my world night's for sleeping (and feeding, and settling babies, and feeding again). Apparently the proliferation of bugs is a matter of garden hygiene; am I to be called a slattern because my mulching leads to the unforeseen consequence of bug eggs and hidey holes? And has planting dill among the cabbages ever confused the moths? So I ask myself as I feed the worm farm, turn the compost, dig in organic matter, collect the snails for the chooks, and a hundred other do-it-the-right way tasks, "why do I bother?"

It's been a challenge to come up with an answer that satisfied me. I guess partly I'm a sucker for a pretty face and some curly hair - each time I watch that earthy Josh on Gardening Australia I renew my commitment to organics. Plus, Pete Cundell does it this way and he's 80, so maybe it's worth it in the long run and I’ll be a spry national treasure as a reward for my efforts. There’s the immediate dangers of poisons: the only time I've used snail bait my dog Jasper, then just a puppy, jumped the fence, ate it and almost died; growing up Lutheran I couldn't shake the feeling that this was a judgement for my sinning ways. And I do like a challenge - gardening organically is an intellectual as well as a physical task, and both dimensions are important to me. Sometimes something good happens: the lady birds I so casually mentioned a few posts back were a long time coming but such a thrill to see their dotty selves in my garden after three years of trying to put things to rights.

There's something else going on as well. Previous owners mistreated this lot and when we bought it, it was a wasteland, irrespective of the big trees and a stunted looking peach. Our garden archaeology turns up broken stubbies and cans of Bundy and Coke. Any part of the soil not intensively nursed by me has no body, no structure and nothing at all living in it. I've never lived in a place where the sight of a worm is an occasion for comment but here it's taken us four years to lure them back into our boundaries. I feel sad that such a beautiful house on such a generous plot - so much larger than anything sub-divided today - could be held in such disdain. I feel we have been blessed to have found this home, particularly when I think of so many people struggling with high house prices and tight rental markets, and my thanks is partly expressed by my stewardship of the little bit of land on which my family lives. I feel - and in this I'm romanticising, I know, I know - that organic methods are designed to develop a partnership with my environment (even though more often than not I'm a junior partner), they are not aimed at domination and getting things only my way. This seems the least I can do given my garden’s sad past.

Stewardship is important to me as a mother. 'Think globally, act locally' may be kind of naff in times when mortgage rates and Aussie values dominate political debate but I try to do the best I can with what I can. I live in a State where my concern for my children's wellbeing, and the health and aesthetics of my world, is marginalised and subjugated to the forestry industry; where some small communities quite often need to boil their water before drinking it; and where regulatory processes can be quite publicly and shamelessly opted out of - with government facilitation - when enough money and influence is at stake. I protest in all the polite ways but last weekend I sat under a tree, listening to anger and hope at a public rally against a pulp mill to be sited up river, and I felt powerless and despairing. It may be that my garden can't really be organic in the time and place where I live but in trying, I'm holding on to my belief that I can make a difference. And even if I can't I'm showing my girls that we are lucky enough to have the choice to leave our place a nicer than when we came to it, and that sometimes what matters is that you try, not that you succeed. Then again, maybe I’m just pissing into the wind.

Either way, I’m back out tomorrow, squishing bugs between my finger and thumb. I hope they appreciate their right-on deaths.

Good organics, inside


and out


On a separate matter: an innocent victim of our lack of sleep. We took our labradoodle Jasper to the vet for his annual check up, only to have him officially designated “fat”. We’re sitting on the couch instead of walking the dog, and the poor fellow is bearing the public shame. No more bacon treats and many more hikes in the forest, that’s his lot.

Eating from the garden: beautifully scrambled eggs with chives for breakfast; apples for snacks; the last of the corn with crab and noodles in a Chinese-esque soup, with steamed bok choy and choy sum (the high point of the eating week).

Tired

Autumn down here is beautiful this year, with cool mornings - just chilly enough for a cuddle to feel good - and clear, clean days, sun shining and sometimes a breeze to cool me down as I prune the fruit trees. It's beautiful but the edge of my enjoyment is blunted through being tired, tired, tired. Two kids, three breast feeds in the night, and Nell's early morning play time are taking their toll. Lu has been a champion sleeper since she was about eight months old and I'd forgotten the dragging, nagging need for sleep that comes along with new babies. In the last week I have: stepped into the bath fully clothed; started to walk out of the pool change rooms without any clothes; forgotten the words to "Twinkle, twinkle little star"; cut, bumped and scraped myself in dozens of different ways and places; and let go this blog in favour of staring into space and reading secondhand Miss Marple mysteries (forgetting the characters, the ending and once, the murder as soon as my eyes have left the words). It's a good thing I'm not planning to operate heavy machinery.

Perhaps the hardest part is the the loss of my own, already very limited time. The girls' routines don't match up and so my first moments to myself come at 7.30 at night. Then, there are no conversations about bumps, diggers, babies and trains, no child clinging to me, no meals to make, dogs to walk or tantrums to ignore. But I'm needing to go to bed at about 8.30 pm and so I've got a window of an hour in which to do something just for me (Al just doesn't get a look in anymore). With back to work looming six weeks down the track, I'm planning on some me time in February 2009. Should be fun.