Three Months

Three months.

The average gestation period of a leopard or a puma. The average waiting time for a US visa appointment.  The amount of time it takes a turnip to grow from seed to harvest.  An acceptable amount of time in which to rewatch all ten seasons of Friends without binging (I’m kidding – why wouldn’t you binge?).  Roughly the amount of time it takes a tadpole to become a frog.  And, for the Inscrutables, the interval between the decision to leave behind our perfectly respectable middle-class suburban home and lifestyle, and finding ourselves happily ensconced, unpacked (almost) and functionally settled into a cottage and a caravan.  Phase One: Complete.  We’ve moved.

Well, almost.  There are still a few odds and ends to sort out at the old house.  Strange how quickly it’s become ‘the old house’.  As if we lived there years ago, and not last week.  I haven’t been back there this week due to work commitments.  Lynn and Dean have been trotting between establishments, slowing sorting through the detritus of our past life in an attempt to discern if any of what’s left has a place in the new one.  It’s the darndest thing, but I have absolutely no desire to revisit.  Normally, I have some attachment to the places I’ve stayed.  My ritual, when moving on from a place I’d called home for a bit, was always to go from room to empty room, reliving the memories made there for a bit and giving silent thanks for the sanctuary provided, however briefly.  I have no desire to do that now, and I’m at a loss as to understand why.

Or perhaps it’s this: every inch of that house represents failure to me.

Projects undone
Renovations incomplete
Plans unfinished
Dreams unrealised
Time wasted

I’m being overly dramatic, but the fact is that I’ve felt more frustration living here than anything else.  All I did, for three years, was battle entropy and lose.  There was never enough time to get to everything the needed doing, and never enough time to finish one project before another one became urgent.  Frustration will be the emotion I associate with that house, and I’m glad it’s no longer ours.

I felt this most keenly last week, whilst cleaning out the Cabbage Patch.

The Cabbage Patch, also known as Jen’s Cave, was a project that Dean and I embarked on a year after we moved in. I’ve always had a passion for growing things.  I don’t profess to be particularly good at it, but there’s something so immensely satisfying about growing things and I find a great deal of peace and quietude in time spend in the garden.  My particular weakness if for growing veggies, and I’ve always wanted to develop a food garden that could conceivably sustain our family and more.  Given that we follow a predominantly plant-based lifestyle (we’re all varying degrees of vegan, vegetarian and white-meat-onlyian), having a food garden that provides us with the bulk of our fresh produce is a terribly practical and sensible idea.  I shared this with Dean and, in true Dean fashion, he immediately set about making my vision a reality.  Our challenge was the monkeys.

Our particular region in the Upper Highway area of Durban, Kwazulu Natal is blessed with glorious weather, verdant valleys, plentiful water and an abundance of wildlife.  Green belts, or natural reserves and protected wildlife sanctuaries cut a swarth through the Valley of 1000 Hills, and it is apparently possible to traverse them all the way to the sea – some 60km away.  Across the road from where I sit right now, a herd of zebra are contentedly grazing along the Conservancy fence.  Tomorrow morning, the Hadedas and Egyptian Geese will complete to wake me up.  Our flora is full of fauna, and it’s wonderful.

The monkeys are a problem.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love them.  Dearly.  Vervet Monkeys are possibly the cutest creatures on earth, and the most mischievous.  Everything about them screams mischief. They’re incorrigible – a relatively small troop can trash a kitchen, find and steal food you didn’t know you owned and wreak havoc that takes hours to clean up in a matter of seconds.  They’re also fascinating creatures, with complicated family dynamics and enough human characteristics to remind the casual observer that we’re not that long out of the trees, ourselves.  No decent or sane human being would do anything to hurt the monkeys, and we all muddle along together as best we can, fitting open windows with monkey-proof bars and trying to remember to lock pantry doors after use.  We are, after all, the invaders here.  Not them.

With this in mind, we set about building a monkey-roof enclosure in which to grow the abundance of fruit and vegetables all my Margaret Roberts gardening encyclopaedias promised I was capable of producing. It took 5 weekends to erect and creosote the poles, secure the chicken mesh on the top and all four sides, and construct the grow boxes for our veggie garden paradise.  We had a great amount of fun doing that, and I spent a summer-full of weekends thereafter, happily pottering in my patch, trying to make things grow.

My efforts were met with moderate success.  I made lots of mistakes and learned a great deal about a great deal.  More than that, I had fun.  Some of my best times in that house were spent in the Cabbage Patch, as it became known, and I was happy there.  Gradually, however, my time was taken up by other things.  The demands of the life we were living and the commitments we have began to suck up every second of spare time, and weeks would go by without a visit to my arbour.  Eventually, when I could spare the time, I would have to spend a few hours beating back the unrelenting forest of weeds and foliage that threatened to reclaim the Patch before I could begin anything new.   Six months ago, I gave up.  It was easier not to think too much about the clearing at the bottom of the garden, with its lovable jumble of gardening tools and pots and watering cans.  I just didn’t have the time.

Pulling on my galoshes last week, I knew what to expect.  And I was right – the weeds had won.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and in my absence the garden had filled in the gap.  Mostly with a thick tangle of scutch grass that had managed to choke everything in its path, and already stood waist-high at the farthest corner of the enclosure.   I set to work extracting the few garden implements and planters I wanted to take with me, and sorting through the huge amount of seed packets as yet untried and unplanted.  There was no pleasure in the process.  It was a thoroughly miserable afternoon, and every moment spent there reminded me of all the plans I’d made in vain, and all the things I’d simply run out of time to do.  The Cabbage Patch is a metaphor for many of the reasons we decided to make the change we did.  A stark reminder of all the time lost or stolen by unnecessary and ceaseless demands – the product of a lifestyle that no longer serves us.

For me, it was the garden.  For Dean it was his F1 motorbike.  It’s languished, in pieces, in the garage since we moved in three years ago.  He bought it as a project-bike, with a view to tinkering on it until it was track-ready.  Initially he made great strides, replacing the forks and a variety of other shiny bits, reconditioning the engine and redoing the electrics.  He loves doing that sort of thing.  Dean is happiest in the garage, with grease on his overalls and something fast that needs fixing.  Gradually, however, the time he had for this hobby became fodder for the bigger projects around the house.  When he sold the bike, still in pieces, a few weeks ago it was with the same mixture of regret and relief that I felt after closing the latch on the Cabbage Patch for the last time.  Another vestige of a life abandoned, behind us.

There will be other Cabbage Patches – I’m nothing if not obstinately optimistic about my future gardening prowess and my ability to feed us all with butternuts the size of rug sacks.  For Dean, there will be other hobby projects when the time is right.  There’s no angst in letting go of these dreams for a season because what we do next will enable us to pursue them later.  That’s the theory, anyway.

This weekend, we finish up at the house and close the door for good.  I’m happy about that.  Then on to Phase Two: The Transition.  I’m excited already.  Not bad going for three months in.