novelty

This morning I stick a For Sale sign on the Jazz’s rear window, park it up on the nature strip to gather gum leaves and any passing interest. Yesterday afternoon I pick up the new car, four and a half months after signing the contract. I pump the dealer’s hand: he’s human, kisses his vet nurse daughter who’s arrived at the dealership with news of the aged, ailing family dog.

The first drive of any meaning is to Carnegie to meet our future tenants and take the measure of our new house. I pick up my good woman along the way. The ‘tenants’ are the current owners; in eleven days they will start paying rent for the house they currently call home until I move in late in April and they move next door.

We enter the house, meet their one and three year-old daughters with the Hawaiian names, gather at the kitchen table. It takes no more than five minutes to arrive at an amicable agreement about the rent, the continuation of services, and the date I move in.

It’s in everyone’s interests to be nice as we will be each others’ immediate neighbours.

My good woman and I move quietly about the house with an orange measuring tape. We take readings from wall to wall in most rooms and along sections of walls—from the corner to the fireplace, the fridge cavity, the width of a door.

Back in my good woman’s kitchen we pore over the floor plan, pencil in where certain furniture items might go, wonder what to do with others. For my good woman the kitchen is the heart of a home; she spends most time there, does most of her talking with kids and friends there. For me my desk is the heart of my home, the kitchen an important place for making a cuppa.

Where to locate a desk occupies most of our ruminations: good sense says the second bedroom becomes the office, but it’s dark and dingy, the least attractive room in our new house, and aesthetics say anywhere else would be better. Then my good woman suggests removing the window and replacing it with a glass door, steps outside. Suddenly I see a pergola, a vision splendid.

I drive home, fuck up a gear change at a set of lights, but otherwise revel in the feel of the new car. Tomorrow my good woman and I drive to Bendigo to see my daughter and grand-daughter Nerri on the occasion of her being two and a quarter.

Rock on.