It All Started with a House…

Early in 2019, about five minutes after the Department of Defence sent my Air Force hubby and myself over to the other side of the country on a posting, they decided (in their wisdom) that the DH had reached his use-by date and he needed to be medically discharged after thirty years of service.

Now this wasn’t necessarily bad news – the Department of Defence look after their members and in the DH’s case, that meant he would be retiring… just a decade earlier than we had envisaged.

And in other great news, it meant we were moving back across the country to where seventy-five percent of the Gang of Four were still living. (And I had missed them, so very much while we were away!)

Moving back to Western Australia at the beginning of the COVID juggernaut meant we had to hang around for six months figuring out our next move. We had plans to move down south of Perth, to an area we had come to love during our visits with BIL and SIL in Nyamup. Along the way, we kept driving through a little town called Bridgetown, and the drive through the main street always had me thinking about moving there. With six months to fill in, we had plenty of time to consider our options and after mulling over things, we started to study properties.

It was round about then, that I saw this little place – built in 1904, it was quirky enough to amuse me and with half an acre of land and a jumble of sheds and gardens in need of work/restoration, not to mention an interior which was renovated in a half-hearted manner by its current owners – it meant there was plenty of little jobs to keep the DH gainfully employed for quite a while. (And if you knew my darling husband, you’d realize how important it is to have some jobs for him to do – despite his medical discharge, he’s not the kind of guy who sits around.)

What has followed has been nearly nine months of busy-ness – and is one of the reasons I haven’t been writing much. For starters, the vast majority of the interior was painted in colors I hated (particularly the sky-blue which was everywhere). Secondly, there wasn’t a single matching door knob in the house – not good for an obsessive compulsive loon like me.

It’s also meant that while already struggling with writer’s block brought on by all the upheaval of the past couple of years, that block has been further compounded by the upheaval of moving in and commencing the restoration of our ‘grand old dame’.

Somehow though, despite the writer’s block I’m dealing with – the characters who roam around the superhighways in my mind haven’t got the message that we’re on a hiatus. So at any given minute of the day, I have characters popping up and giving me a heads up on their plans for their stories to be heard, and they keep on bombarding me with little ‘bites’ of information. Not enough to nudge the writer’s block out of the way, but enough that I’m considering it a positive start.

Now if I can just get rid of the sky blue paint around the place, I might be on the road to writing something useful…