Tom and I live in 23 square metres, indoors. Outdoors, the space is more generous: 14 hectares of forest, paddocks and buildings that make up Makahuri. This fact is an enormous consolation right now.
This is the end of week 2 of lockdown. New Zealanders have to stay at home apart from essential trips such as to the supermarket or pharmacy. We have to stay with those in our “bubble”.
Tom, the other component in my bubble, is working from home, spared his usual long commute and doing all his tasks by way of internet.
Just before the lockdown, Tom and I marched in the pride parade in Wellington.
I’m based at home, as always, staying busy. Most days, like today, I work on blog tasks and chores, and achieving my lockdown goals: learning how to edit video, and brushing up my German. Tom sits nearby, gazing at his own screen and signing in to a lot of work meetings online.
“Two Kiwi guys, two little dogs, one tiny home.” That was the little marketing identifier, the three-part high-concept description, that I added to this blog title when I started it two and a half years ago.
Since October, the two little dogs are no more. Phoebe and Connor died, a day apart.
Phoebe and Connor at Waikanae Beach.
My nine-word identifier for this blog has lost its middle third, and sometimes it really has felt as though the middle third of my recent life, the bit that had charm, beauty and fun, has suddenly vanished.
This is hard to write about, again — I wrote about it on Facebook for followers of my pets blog, and on the blog itself. The thought of doing it again on The Mustard Yellow House daunted me, hence the extra-long gap between my last post and this one.
Bathing in sun in the tiny house.
But the story of Phoebe and Connor is part of the story of the Mustard Yellow House. I’ll tell it briefly here; I went into more detail here.
In late September Phoebe fell ill, with what we thought was a return of previous back trouble. It turned out her kidneys had failed.
Phoebe at 11 years old.
We had a day to get used to the implications. Phoebe was euthanised with Tom and me holding her, and Connor sitting on the vet’s bench next to her. In moments when I’d thought ahead to how our dogs would die, I envisaged this kind of ending for both of them — with pain minimised and with care and reverence.
I had also envisaged that one of our dogs would die before the other, and that one would be left alone, perhaps for many years. How would the surviving dog feel, I’d wondered. How would we handle that?
We would never find out.
The next day, 26 hours after Phoebe breathed her last, Connor had a massive heart attack at home. Again, here is a fuller telling.
The day Connor explored his dad’s desk.
We were in shock. The dogs had been sewn into our lives for ten years, including the whole time we’d lived in the Mustard Yellow House. Now the house seemed to resonate with memories of Phoebe and Connor, and all we felt we could do was flee the noise for a while.
Tom and I spent the next few days away, some of it with family, to nurse ourselves and be nursed.
***
We came back.
We dismantled the modular fences that contained the dogs to the front and back of the house. The dog-flap is locked against the wind.
Most of the dog-smelly blankets and paraphernalia, including the steps that gave the dogs access to the couch, went to the SPCA. Tom sold the Doggy Ride that hooked on the back of his bike.
But we still have the dogs’ collars and leashes, and the crates they loved so much. One doesn’t want to get rid of all the dog-owner infrastructure, because one never knows what might happen in a fresh new year.
***
What else has been going on?
Peabody is a rarer sight these days, perhaps because he has bred successfully this season. Hoping to see him again soon. Peacocks drop their tail feathers in January-February so I’ll be undertaking feather-gathering walks to add to my collection. Not so much “walks” as “hobbles”…
The cartilage of my right knee is in shreds, limiting my ability to walk and perhaps ending my cycling days. Surgery is possible. In the meantime, I’m building fitness with sessions of straight-leg aqua-jogging — imagine a cross-country skier’s action, under water. A good start to a new-year fitness effort.
I’ve been granted a tiny but welcome bit of funding to do an oral history of Marycrest/Makahuri. A new project for 2020.
Cheese making continues. The Makahuri cow, George, is still producing as much as 9 litres of superb milk a day, so I’m doing a couple of cheeses a week. Recent successes include colby and sage derby; currently experimenting with epoisses, port salut and taleggio.
I’m trying to figure out how to turn The Mustard Yellow House blog into an eBook. Stay tuned!
Happy 2020 to everyone who follows or discovers this blog!
I’m still here. I haven’t blogged in three months, which means autumn has been and gone. Here is what’s happening at the Mustard Yellow House and the Paddock World it occupies.
Winter came
The frosts, when they’ve hit, have iced the paddock, stiffened the frost cloth that I drape over the ambitiously chosen plants in our yard (papaya, passionfruit etc), but not yet frozen the pipes as they did once last winter.
Paddock World on a frosty July morning.
But those frosty mornings grow into glorious middays when I can open the french doors on the north side and the dogs can spread out on the warmed-up carpet.
Today at 1.32pm I sat on a folding chair on our sunny “porch” of shipping pallets and shared the national two minutes of silence for the 50 fellow Kiwis murdered exactly a week earlier in two Christchurch mosques.
Halfway through those two minutes, Phoebe trotted up to me so I picked her up and cuddled her in the early-autumn sun.
It’s weeks since I last posted. I didn’t mean this to be a slow-moving blog, so I shall explain.
We went away. For a month. For our first full-scale, long-form holiday in many years.
We planned and we booked and we packed. We locked up the Mustard Yellow House, turned off the electric system and the gas connections, and caught a plane to … Europe.
Don’t worry, this isn’t an excuse to post travel pics. Well, maybe one.
This trip was a fruition, part of the POINT of changing our way of life — going tiny, downsizing, giving up Stuff in favour of Experiences.
It’s a year since Tom and I moved out of our last land-based “big” house. Our life now is different in many ways. What I want to talk about here is the change in life’s rhythms.
The Mustard Yellow House — the view George the cow gets as she heads to milking.
Frost, frozen pipes, muddy boots, drums at solstice, new life, new growth, new knowledge. Such has been our first winter at Makahuri in the Mustard Yellow House.
The coldest day of the year so far was June 22 — the first morning after the southern hemisphere winter solstice. The supposed “middle of winter” in fact comes early in the season, with two-thirds of it — and probably the coldest part of it — yet to come.
That morning, our paddock showed a new colour. Summer had brought dry brown, autumn bloomed greenly, but last Friday the grass and our outdoor possessions all gained the white of frost for the first time in our nine-and-a-half-months here.
Alexa, Tom asked, what’s the temperature? Minus two, she replied.
The Mustard Yellow House 