Hauling

The (seemingly) endless project of clearing the spaces of this enormous, history-infested house continues. I spent today hauling crap out from the side of the house, where the entire little lane between building & fence had been filled with the detritus of good intentions past. We hauled rotting chair frames, eskies, a huge "ESPRIT" light box, bird cages, branches, heavy plywood boards, rotting planks, plant pots, doors, glass window panes and more.

And finally, right up the very farthest reaches, when we'd been going for hours, we found these: an entire unit of beautifully stenciled soldiers, more than 8 feet tall each (for scale, that's a fridge you can see on the right-hand side of the photo). 15 at least (I didn't really count), resting on their sides, all in amazingly good condition. They'll have been there since shortly after the outbreak of the Iraq war, left behind after a Reclaim The Streets or an anti-war protest or a fundraising gig. They're quite amazing, really beautiful in person, but what are we gonna do with them? I certainly don't want to decorate my backyard with enormous US soldiers- bad vibes. So out into the laneway they went, hoping for a random scavenger to find them and offer them new life somewhere.

The work is getting us somewhere, bit by little bit. I walked into my backyard today and smiled- a backyard free of scattered junk & rubbish is an amazing thing to behold. Each part of this house that we reclaim, clear out, consolidate is a territorial win for us against the weight of the history of the place. Making it our place, our home, full only of the things that we want and love. There is something so incredibly depressing about the way my eyes slide over and past mountains of rubbish, junk, rotted intentions, that colonize all over this huge property. It's as though this junk, or the intentions of the people who put it there years ago and then forgot about it, is more important than we are, the women who live here. To clear it out is to declare ourselves the real inhabitants of this space. It's magic.