Growing older
Oct. 7th, 2012 19:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillIt's odd, living most of your life in the same house. It's comfortable and familiar, yes -- but the flip side is that when things change, it can be jarring. Especially when you find out that they changed a while ago, and you just hadn't noticed; like a familiar face, you always use mental shorthand to represent it, and then something finally becomes so different that the shorthand fails and you see them for who they really are now, years later.
I'm renovating a third of an acre that has been neglected, almost all the time, for as long as I've been alive. Attempts have been made to tame it at various points, but the invasives took over, or the sprinklers failed, or the shade became too dense, and it all reverted back to a wild state. I grew up in that suburban wilderness, making tunnels under the overgrown bushes and playing in the shoulder-high grass. Now, as an adult, I look at it and find that though the wildness is still there, the shape has changed. The fig tree that we climbed in is dead, the massive trunk fallen over, and its scions have moved closer to the lawn for water. There is no longer any real delineation between the area behind the shop and the back forty, it's all sort of a piece. The secret places at the front of the lawn were the first to go, when I took out the huge hedge of weed trees blocking our view of the street five years ago.
I drew the map of the property, when I started this project, using the familiar lines and landmarks from my childhood; many of the areas were roughly square. Today, after clearing out a lot of dead fig wood and vines, I got my first glimpse of a completely new area, sunny and open, which extends the back forty in a new direction and ties it even more to the area behind the shop. Suddenly the logical divisions no longer run in straight lines, east to west -- they run in curves, and offer the possibility of north-south distinctions. If you've ever seen a raw landscape plan, you may have seen the several sketches used to settle on a final design; each one of them would lead to a very different space, a different future. I'm seeing those sketches in real life, as I stare at this new reality.
This property is going to look very different, I've known that since the beginning. But somehow my mental images always used the same lines to divide areas and character. Out front that still holds, as there are some non-negotiable things like the driveway to contend with. Out back, though, I'm starting to see my childhood home melting away, not through any direct action of mine but through just the passage of time. My designs will add to that. I'm not upset about it -- I'll like the new landscape, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it, and the past is long gone -- but it made me stop and think a bit about preconceptions and familiarity.
Once the wood chip trucks come in and cover the back, I'll have the task of deciding where to draw the new lines, and what future to choose. I hope I will have shaken off a few more of my assumptions and bits of mental shorthand by then.
I'm renovating a third of an acre that has been neglected, almost all the time, for as long as I've been alive. Attempts have been made to tame it at various points, but the invasives took over, or the sprinklers failed, or the shade became too dense, and it all reverted back to a wild state. I grew up in that suburban wilderness, making tunnels under the overgrown bushes and playing in the shoulder-high grass. Now, as an adult, I look at it and find that though the wildness is still there, the shape has changed. The fig tree that we climbed in is dead, the massive trunk fallen over, and its scions have moved closer to the lawn for water. There is no longer any real delineation between the area behind the shop and the back forty, it's all sort of a piece. The secret places at the front of the lawn were the first to go, when I took out the huge hedge of weed trees blocking our view of the street five years ago.
I drew the map of the property, when I started this project, using the familiar lines and landmarks from my childhood; many of the areas were roughly square. Today, after clearing out a lot of dead fig wood and vines, I got my first glimpse of a completely new area, sunny and open, which extends the back forty in a new direction and ties it even more to the area behind the shop. Suddenly the logical divisions no longer run in straight lines, east to west -- they run in curves, and offer the possibility of north-south distinctions. If you've ever seen a raw landscape plan, you may have seen the several sketches used to settle on a final design; each one of them would lead to a very different space, a different future. I'm seeing those sketches in real life, as I stare at this new reality.
This property is going to look very different, I've known that since the beginning. But somehow my mental images always used the same lines to divide areas and character. Out front that still holds, as there are some non-negotiable things like the driveway to contend with. Out back, though, I'm starting to see my childhood home melting away, not through any direct action of mine but through just the passage of time. My designs will add to that. I'm not upset about it -- I'll like the new landscape, otherwise I wouldn't be doing it, and the past is long gone -- but it made me stop and think a bit about preconceptions and familiarity.
Once the wood chip trucks come in and cover the back, I'll have the task of deciding where to draw the new lines, and what future to choose. I hope I will have shaken off a few more of my assumptions and bits of mental shorthand by then.
