CHANGES AHEAD

Ploughing on ...

We visited Miriam yesterday.  She is looking so good, full of beans, chatting away.  She'd spell the words we didn't understand, and if we still didn't get the meaning she'd write them down in the side column of her Word Find book.  She is resource full as ever.  The staff at the McGlynn Home have adjusted fantastically to giving Miriam an interesting gluten free diet. 

She'll come home for a meal next week.  That will be the last time for her to be in this house and it will be hard for her to accept this.  As hard as it is for all of us, slowly detaching ourselves from 'possessions', and I mean possessions not in a valuable way but of having been attached to them: some bits of simple furniture, e.g. a shelving unit with plate glass shelves and rimu surrounds holding a selection of vases on the top shelf and all sorts of things on the other shelves, cook books on the bottom one.  A garden table with four chairs.  We know they'll go to good homes.  And then there are the plants in the garden, the abundance of roses right now, so glorious.  The peony rose in flower for the first time, oh, how poignant to pick a huge bunch realising that for me the picking is not only its first but also its last time.  Our wonderful Freyberg apples, a tree planted the same year as I was born.

But we have many things to be grateful for and I will be glad when those intense waves of sadness of leaving behind 53 years in this lovely suburb will be replaced by hopefully happy and new experiences when we move into our unit at Summerset Bishopscourt. 

A few weeks ago Bart had to make concrete and needed to get sharp sand at the quarry down the road from us.

Blackhead Quarry Logan Park.

The new Dunedin Stadium in the background.

  We drove up the hill and as I got out of the car I was amazed to see the end result of the variety of the processes after the initial drilling and blasting of rocks out of the steep rock face.  After blasting, the rocks are transported to different crushers and finally are sorted into different stages of crushed material.

 While there I felt as if I was in a hot and windy alien world. I took some photos and added them to this blog as the processed 'heaps' reminded me of what we're doing right now.   We did cut our tie with this house when it was sold, gradually we cut deeper and deeper with giving away some of our possessions to different organisations, or throwing away things we thought might come in handy one day.  We even had a garage sale.  And now there's going to be the final cut very soon, the house full of bags and boxes selected to go with us.  Bart complains I've taken too many books.  He's right.

 Life has taught me enough lessons to know that not everything will go smoothly but I know too that there will be strength to cope when the rocks are a bit rough or uneven. 

Is this Dunedin or Mars?