... the way I saw the world on Wednesday.
Before we moved to Perth I spent a lot of hours looking at it on Google Earth. And I mean A LOT of hours. I looked at rental house after rental house, and I looked at some of the ones for sale as well. I looked at schools and I looked a little bit at some of the cooler stuff as well. Things is, when you look at stuff on a flat screen- you tend to think of it as flat.
Perth is not flat.
I generally felt pretty lost on my first few weeks driving around the city. I had a picture in my head of the map and I could see things as up and down and left and right and it just didn't translate in my head once I was on the road and it was north and south, east and west. I was totally confused by my perception and the reality.
In that first couple of weeks as we looked for a place to live- we were looking specifically at places and how to get there and not so much the in between and round about. I remember one house we considered was on Hale Road. We came at it from another house in the same suburb and it seemed pretty quiet and like an ok place to live. Now that I travel up Hale Road a few times each week along with half of my neighbours to go to the shopping centre I know that Hale Rd would not be a quiet place to live!
I was so overwhelmed by everything that was going on that I could only focus on one thing at at time. I failed to take in my surroundings and all the peripheral stuff as well.
Perth can warp your sense of perception too. There are so many green areas and little pockets of farm land or swamp land or bush that some areas can feel quite rural and then you drive a block to find yourself dumped squarely back in the lap of suburbia.
Even in our street if you stood in the middle of the road a few houses down looking to the other side of our road you'd see the school and a lot of houses all between new and maybe 5 or so years old. And turn around and you'd see a metal track leading who knows where beside a farm with sheep, chickens, cattle and goats. Complete with a old school wind mill and water tank. What you don't realise is beyond the four paddocks you can see, suburbia is creeping in and there are two major highways converging just beyond that clump of ever present Eucalyptus.
What this has meant for me is that that feeling that you get when you drive somewhere new and come round a corner that brings a magical vista into view has been and gone. And now the everyday, the going to shops, walking to school and whipping down the highway for photos is tarnishing my rosy first view. It's altering how I feel about the place I live- not necessarily in a bad way, just different.
Something that I like to do here is to head off into the unknown. So on Wednesday after Will told me he was exhausted and Tama failed to go to sleep as expected we jumped into the car for a 'drive'.
Now when I say drive, what I mean is. I'm going to leave the air con off for a while so it is quite warm, I'm going to turn the music up a little and claim that it is 'quiet time'- just for thinking and looking. And YOU my darling sons will drift peacefully off to sleep.
We stopped for Milk at the garage and then journeyed on and 2 minutes later as we climbed the Lesmurdie Hill Wills eyelids were getting heavy. And by the time we made it up to the turn off for Kieran's school they were closed more often than they were open. And a minute or so later he was completely out to it. Tamas car seat is rear facing so I can't see him but I don't think he would have been awake much longer if at all.
I could have turned around and gone home. Parked the car up, carefully lifted Will into his bed. And taken Tama into my arms for a drink that would have sustained his sleep. But I wanted to adventure and so I drove on. Into uncharted territory.
Uncharted territory known as Pickering Brook.
There's very little there. A general store on your way into the valley. A truck mechanic with cool old school signage. A smattering of houses and Pickering Brook school.
The rest of the area is bush... read: gum trees. And orchards.
It is beautiful.
Beautiful.
It felt warm and inviting. Sleepy, but summery bright. It felt full of life but totally calm. It was friendly. And if you could have eaten it it would have been a fresh crisp apple, green with rosy patches, not too sweet and not too tart, the kind that sprinkles you face with tiny droplets of apple juice as you bite in- so that you catch it's aroma as you eat.
The rows of fruit trees spread out in uniform lines reaching long emerald arms towards the bush with it's darker bottle greens and the mottled browns and greys of the up stretched trunks and limbs of the gum trees. Fruit peeped and glittered with potential from amongst the branches. And the scene was repeated over and over into the far reaches of the valley that spanned in front of me.
A field of sunflowers was a buttery surprise as I turned a corner. And a welcoming homestead straight out of an oil painting or a song... a home among the gum trees....
Let me reiterate- it was beautiful.
Now that I've seen it. I won't see it like that again. My perspective will be altered by familiarity. Don't get me wrong, it will still be beautiful- but it won't be strikingly beautiful because I've already been struck. By seeing it for the first time I've already altered my perspective.
But it's a gift.
Eventually I turned back. Burning petrol for sight seeing isn't the most frugal idea and I had in mind some plans I might be able to execute if the boys stayed asleep on our return home. As I drove I composed this post and once more my perspective shifted.
How incredibly lucky I am to be living in a new place with discoveries up almost every road.
And how fortunate to have two sweet exhausted boys, driving me crazy with their inability to cope with life when running low on energy. Without them I would have stayed at home. I would most likely have hung washing, surfed the net, or sorted out dinner... or perhaps I might even have been at work of some kind or other.
But instead their needs and my job, as their mum, to fulfil those needs took me on a most amazing journey, an adventure, to a most splended and delightful place and changed my perspective, for the better, forever.
Which is lucky, because they both woke up when the garage door went up, little stinkers.
♥
