Moving outdoors

Well, finally life is starting to settle down a bit. Enough that I can relax with my new husband and start to let being married sink-in. The last two weeks have been an absolute whirlwind of activity and we have had family around non-stop. We even had people staying in our flat (in the living room since we have no guest rooms) and it served as a holding space for luggage for everyone coming and going. Laundry was done almost every day and the living room was crowded with so much stuff. It has been an exercise in patience for me as well. Everywhere I looked in the house it was a mess, but I couldn’t clean as most stuff wasn’t ours. There was stuff everywhere and I saw all the de-cluttering I’d been doing totally undone. *sigh*

 

The only way to escape the madness inside over which I had no control was to open-up the back door and roll outside. We recently bought garden furniture (before the minimalism thing) and we had the table and chairs out almost constantly, we could sit outside in the calm and have a meal not staring at all the clear-up work that still needed doing. That was a saviour. My sister, who’s turned into an avid gardener and grows a lot of her own vegetables, helped me to convert a small plot by our back door into a herb garden. Now we can sit outside and have the garden to look at. It is very pretty and makes me happy. We should have done this long ago but it was the initial effort needed that always seemed too much. Now my sister’s husband prepped the soil while we went shopping for the plants and then we spent a couple of hours decided on the layout and where to put stuff that was quite enjoyable. That night I used some of our wedding jars with candles to place around the garden and having dinner outside was great. My husband, who didn’t seem very keen on gardening before, was talking about the watering system he could set-up and seemed very excited as well.

Bonus, last night we had a braai for the building tenants (this is a first for our building but it nice that everyone seems to get on and we have some interesting neighbours) and everyone seemed really impressed and motivated as well. Now there’s talk of getting a worm farm and extending the gardening efforts to adjoining plots. It is motivating that other people are so excited as well. It’s a very different response than I had to the minimizing though.