Moving

The last two weeks or so have been jam-packed. Grice and Elle had swimming for HPE (Health and Physical Education, pronounced “Haych Pee Ee”) which I volunteered to help out with all day and all week long, then there was a P&C (Parent and Community, pronounced the usual way) meeting and pot luck supper, plus the high school’s annual sort-of-near-the-end-of-the-year award ceremony where Sarabelle received a Merit Award, and we also packed up all our belongings and relocated to our newest temporary abode with all the difficulties of new phone and internet service, so please excuse the break in posting.

We’re now living in a guesthouse on the side of a mountain. The owners’ property includes most of the mountain, their fortress of a house up above us, and the 40-acre piece with the convertible stables, two creeks, and several ponds that they recently subdivided and will be placing on the market down below. The owners don’t mind creative financing, they don’t need the money, but are primarily concerned with finding good neighbors because the properties share access and water systems. They are taking us out for a test drive.

The cottage is only a one bedroom, one bath space, but it has soaring ceilings, plenty of square footage, an almost-gourmet kitchen, laundry, large screened back dining porch, and a very clean bathroom. The owners were beach resort developers so the place has the feel of super-roomy, upscale motel accommodations from the generic artwork to the headboard and hair dryer mounted on the walls. The best part though is the land itself. The property was formerly a working mine and logging site so there are trails and roads all over the place. Our landlord maintains the old roads, connected some others, and pushed a few new ones in too. From their house you can see the mountains all the way down south to Cairns, about a 90-minute drive from here, and if you take the path up past their house, you can see the sea. There’s a 90-foot waterfall and spots with names like Picnic Pasture where you can laze around after a hike through the rainforest. It’s like having your own private park. When I was around nine, back in the days when childhood was fun and dangerous, we visited friends of my father in Connecticut who lived across from a beautiful park with terraced rock gardens and heavily landscaped walks. With endless hiding places and armed with coffee cans full of marbles, we played the most fabulous war game ever (and nobody even lost an eye.) Now my kids can experience the same delights.

Elle, after a walk down the mountain where we discovered the back side of one of the horse paddocks, crossed a hillside covered with blue-tops, and found three ponds before visiting the creek this afternoon, excitedly said, “Let’s go adventure some more stuff, Mom!”


Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is the explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home on every continent.

-- Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man)