Chicken Little
Well this week has not been my finest I must say. I don’t even feel like my feet have touched the ground in the past 6 days and I suspect that I have moved from the glorious and much sought-after “edge of chaos” (a place of instinctive and prolific creativity), and jumped straight into plain old chaos (a condition of great disorder and/or confusion), with both feet … quite firmly planted.
I am traditionally an optimist, and to the mind-boggling annoyance of my husband, I somehow manage to see an upside in almost anything. This week I have repeated to myself that “this too shall pass”, but frankly I am feeling a little frazzled and short-fused. This is confusing in itself as my mother is here to watch Jasper while I work so I should feel as though I am far more productive than usual, but no.
There are reasons for my “Chicken Little” routine. Once again, I am going to have to admit that I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew. I am renowned for taking too much on and this is another perfect example. My motto for years was “always bite off more than you can chew and just chew harder!” I must be getting older as this doesn’t seem half as appealing as it used to.
To give a snapshot of my life at the moment, my 16 month-old son (Jasper) is happy and healthy, we’re gearing up for another IVF round in a month or two, the house is looking good (Mum is staying with us at the moment), She-Tea is growing and taking on new directions, (we are out of our comfort zone, but in a good way). I am doing some local wine sales for She-Oak Hill Winery, I work in the Pantechnicon Gallery once a week, I am on the Daylesford Makers Market Committee and working on marketing and promotions, I am painting 2 commission pieces for clients in Melbourne and on the Gold Coast, have just launched my new website, and so on. Somehow I can balance all of these things, cook the dinner and pay the bills with only an occasional meltdown. This is the edge of chaos that I seem to thrive in. With all of these things humming along beautifully, we then had the brilliant idea to start landscaping the back yard…and this is when the wheels began to fall off.
What I had envisioned as a series of lovely weekend projects for the family has become an enormous task that is just that little bit overwhelming, to be honest. It started with getting someone in to dig the earth away from the back of the house so we could create some terraces with vegetables in them and improve drainage and living space etc. Because we live on Wombat Hill in Daylesford, we knew that it would be a bit of dirt, but not quite that much!
To make a long story short, some areas of our newly-formed backyard cliffs are up to 3 meters high and our digger man was unable to remove the dirt due to poor lane access so we have piles and piles of topsoil above fence lines in some areas. I went to council to learn that not only do we now need a soil test and engineer’s plans if we decide to build a large retaining wall; it’s also going to be around a $10,000 job. Is it too early to start drinking?
There are positives in this situation, at least we have started the job, and at least we have once again provided entertainment and amusement to the locals who have come and popped their heads in for a sticky, and at least we have provided some great topsoil to my acupuncturist to support her impressive gardening talents. Jasper has also experienced great joy watching the diggers coming and going with Nanny from the perfect vantage point.
It’s clear, however, even after spending a small fortune on renovating our old Victorian cottage, we still haven’t learnt that things always, always, cost more than you think they will and jobs like this are always, always, much more involved than you expect them to be.
Thankfully I am meeting a lovely friend this afternoon for a glass or two of wine and a long, uninterrupted conversation. Without children (thanks Mum), without work, and without being surrounded by an ocean of soil. Then, tomorrow morning, I vow to wake up with a fresh enthusiasm for our backyard, a renewal of old commitments to just chew harder and faster, and a new-found love of the taste of dirt!
