Already we've watched the season change in our new home town. The winter cold with icy mornings and chill evenings have given way to a cool early spring and now a lovely warm late one. When I first came up from Melbourne the fields were awash with the breath taking buttercup yellow of the canola flowers amid the green grassy hillsides. They promised a good crop of oil but it wasn't long before the vista seemed wilted. Not being a country girl, I asked how the canola crops work and was told that they wait until the flowers fall before the harvesters come through delicately scooping up the oily debris. I was told also that in their wake the second harvesters come through to cut the wheat, barley and oats. I am still largely mystified by the process but I am delighted to have spent my first harvest season in the country to witness the change of colours and textures as the sunny yellow has been replaced by the dry gold of the crisp wheat crops and hay bales.
Roger does not have the same romantic attachment to the spring that I have although he does appreciate the visuals. As a hayfever sufferer however, the pollen on the breeze is not his something that takes his fancy. And I have to admit that the dusty, gritty wind gets up my nose too. I am coming to terms with the fact that I live in a dust bowl, not only a dusty interior created by our efforts at sanding and grinding but just a generally dusty town. When up in the roof space investigating the state of the old horse-plaster ceiling, Roger discovered 80 years worth of rust-coloured topsoil dust blown in from the street. It is 15cms of very fine but also very dense dust and he has had to wear breathing apparatus in a dark, cramped, and very hot confined space. But we are making headway with it at least.
And meanwhile I battle constantly with the dust inside the cafe. I understand that at the moment we are working in a renovation zone that is currently not sealed to the outside world but I am still suspicious that dust will be something I am constantly fighting in order to keep a clean environment for our guests and diners. Dust, and spiders. Our work flurry has been stirring up the eight-legged critters of which I am not fond. Mostly they have been daddy-long-legs which I can handle because they eat flies but every once in a while I come across a blacker, hairier, more beady-eyed cousin staring boldly at me from a corner where there was no spider the day before. Roger is not much help in coming to my rescue...and it's not even as if I am asking him to kill the critter (because I know that not only are they quite good for the environment but I have this unshakeable superstition that killing a spider will result in bad arachno-karma revenge somewhere down the line). No, all I ask is that I don't have to look at the thing and believe me, if I know it's there, I will see it in my sleep. But Roger's reply to my nervous question of "what kind of spider is that?" (because I know that every spider in Australia is potentially lethal), is merely: "Oh it's a fingerweb. Probably harmless." I don't believe him for a second but he does like to torment an innocent Kiwi sometimes by making up new spiders. My response is simply not to frequent that corner of the building until it leaves of its own accord. I figure that the building is big enough for me and the black hairy thing to avoid each other for a day or two. After all, if David Attenborough is to be believed, the fingerweb is more scared of me than I am of it.
But then there are the flies that the spiders are not good at catching. At the moment we are not bothering about them because we have no food in the cafe and we need the doors open to air out the paint smell. But when we are open I know already that I will be very much on the fly crusade. To be fair to the daddy-long-legs and the fingerwebs, I think that it is not so much a case of them not being good at catching flies, as there are too many flies for them to catch. The other night we had a very cute baby blue-tongue lizard on our kitchen window. He was licking his lips and snaffling up the tiny bugs out in the night air. I wanted to keep him as a pet because he was really cool but now I think I could happily employ him in the cafe as our resident fly catcher.
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