Our Secret Garden

You’ve seen pictures of my Mallacoota garden. I thought I knew it, but I was oh-so-wrong (gee, how very unusual!) When it hasn’t been horribly hot and snakified(!) I’ve been out weeding or walking Basil on his little leash, and we’ve discovered a whole secret garden – the garden you only see when you have your nose at ground level, sort of Basil-like. So instead of the Big Picture stuff, like sunrise on the flowering gum

 or the birdbath, 

  you see this when you’re cutting back the hydrangea:

 or this, by the pond after Basil has taken an unscheduled swim:

 It’s an endless journey of discovery, and I’m only seeing it now, on my hands and knees as I clutch at the myriad weeds that have tried to take over while the house has been empty over the past year.

Basil is having a fab time, both indoors and out. He fell in the pond again this morning, but seemed quite unperturbed by it. There were too many things to look at for his sogginess to be a problem, so he shook a wet paw briefly at the world before ploughing on to look for lizards and beetles, and to give the birdlife the evil eye.

Thank goodness he’s on his extender-leash, is all I can say! It stops him getting the birds or escaping through the fence or onto the road. It doesn’t stop him getting tangled in branches, though, in which case he simply sits patiently and waits for me to untangle him. So cute. And today he climbed his first tree – something he’s been practising for indoors over the past week.

We’ve been residents of Mallacoota for nearly 3 weeks now, and it feels SO right. The days and nights have taken on a comfortable routine. The sleepy rhythms of life make the days seem longer and more livable. The 'franticity' of life has slowed to a reasonable speed, and it's fabulous. There's time to smell the roses (and dead-head them, prune them, pull out the weeds around them... wheeeee!)

Lead on, Adventure Cat!