Dec 2, 2009
In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Room, in the Tiki Tiki Tiki room, all the birdies sing and the flowers bloom, in the Tiki Tiki,Tiki room--Baby D’s favorite song.
That song came to be Baby D's before we knew we had a little auxiliary building on the property--it's a car seat settling melody. When we discovered we had an out-building, and a cute one at that, we dubbed it the Tiki Room. There were various plans for it, Husband D’s office, my office, but our first day here Daughter D fell in love with it. It is larger than her bedroom in the regular house, and has such potential for an interior designer like her. (Open side walls, screened-in, needs more screening in the eves.) "The energy there is really good," she says.
The Imagineers from Disneyland must have copied the road to our house when they built the Indiana Jones ride. If you endure the three miles of potholes you will land on a lush green compound in the jungle—our property.
I fell into cultural shock the first day at the house. The road, the primitiveness of it, the “What have we done?” aspect. Daughter D felt lost. I felt lost. We all had low-grade colds, so were not in the best of humor or condition.
And here I was quoting Thoreau not long ago, “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately…”
Yet, I know living deliberately is not so much about where one lives, but ones attitude. Right now mine stinks. We decided we wanted the adventure, and knew a REALLY big change will force something. That something is yet to be discovered. A new way of thinking, perhaps? Daughter Number One says if you change 29 things (that many huh?) in your life you will change your life. The question is will we like the change? Some of my friends say, “It will be perfect.”
I wrote this before I had Internet connection, but we brought the computer in a suitcase, both a lap top and a full-sized computer. So you see we had priorities. And we have electricity. I thank God every time I flip a switch and our solar power works. And once we connected the propane, we smelled gas from the range, so I refused to use it. (I brought a one burner propane camp stove, we are using that.) Daughter D says, “Some amenities would be nice.”
The house is cute, and by nightfall that first day, I settled into it. Coming here was like going to a mountain cabin. You schlep in your stuff, you feel you are outside your element, but you enter into the house, and yes, you are camping, but it’s all right. Daughter D said it was like going to sixth grade camp. The previous owners left some furnishings. Bless their hearts. The furnishings serve us, the enormous amount of junk on the property doesn’t. We have a bed, a couch, and other things. I brought clean sheets and towels, and we went to a Laundromat and washed the in-house comforters. Daughter D put the two bunk bed mattresses on the floor in her room, and that’s where she and Baby D sleep.
I like the simpleness of the house, and I shudder whenever a box comes in. I think of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s book Gift from the Sea, and her beach house where she kept it simple, and let the sand blow through, and brought in shells she gleaned from the beach—each one a metaphor for her mind droppings.
Our belongings are traversing the ocean as I speak. So are the cars. The question is, "Will the trucker get the shipping container past those potholes and to our house?
P.S. I will attempt again to give you a picture of the Tiki House. After an hour or so to download it failed.
