Yesterday and today

We are winding towards the end of our holiday here in rural NSW – I remember this feeling from when I was a kid. A little bit of excitement to be going home but a heavy, sad feeling in my stomach to be leaving this lovely place and going back to the Real Life. I always get to this point and start imagining how we could up and move and live here. I say to Phil “We could live here!” and he looks at me with something resembling horror and leaves the room. He knows I have a tendency to idealise a life not lived.

Here are two photos of the house we are staying in. One is hanging in the hallway, snapped from an old wide-lens photograph dated around 1922 when the house was newly finished. It was built by my Great Great Grandmother Mary and her third Husband Alick who had recently arrived to join his new wife from Scotland. We have Alick’s diaries which include a record of the building of the house.There are some 42,000 bricks in this house! Amazing.

The other I snapped yesterday. I tried to get exactly the same angle except it would have meant tresspassing into the neighbour’s paddock and climbing fences and negotiating overgrown pastures. I was in my ugg boots (because when am I not these holidays?) and it all seemed too hard.

So I tell my girls and their little cousin James that they are the 6th generation to be sitting by the fire at night, and the 6th generation to be wondering when the mud will settle in the tank so that the drinking water is less brown, and the 6th generation to be falling asleep listening to the frogs and the willy wagtails. Totally cool.