The distant hum of construction burbled just out of earshot as I stepped into my garden. Unlike the rest of my house, the garden had been finished well ahead of schedule, and I savoured its lush, green beauty and the calm it brought to my life.
It gave me a chance to reflect, this garden of mine, a chance to think back over my day and my week and reassess how things were going. Was I happy? Did I need to change anything?
Change was the name of the game, at the moment at least. I’d just hired a new company near Melbourne that specialises in kitchen design, and they’d been doing wonders to the place, giving me all sorts of incredible design ideas that I could already see becoming indispensable to how I lived my life. Even my wife was happy with some of the kitchen renovation ideas that had been thrown around – although she was strangely more invested in the laundry.
To be very clear, the laundry isn’t her room – we run a much more progressive household than that. It’s a shared task, between me, her and our older kids. Actually, if we broke it down, it would probably be me who did most of the washing. I quite like it, I suppose. Very meditative. Simple, rewarding work. That being said, my wife has had all of the best laundry renovation ideas, I suppose.
I think I can hear her coming now actually. Or is she just shouting at a construction worker for smoking too close to the house again? Yes, that’s definitely it. She’s never liked the garden much (a fact for which I am very grateful). No, she’s very content within her four walls, and I don’t judge her for it. But I love the fresh air, the green leaves, the sense of time passing with each emerald shoot, bursting from the soil. It’s heaven.
Well, I suppose you aren’t able to stay in heaven for too long – not while you’re still alive at least.
Back to the kitchen I go.