Bridge Building

This is a big week in the life of Onemilebridge Farm. Last August I wrote about how the bridge to our property had begun to fail and needed to be replaced. I wrote about how we loved that bridge and how our friends did too. Our artist friend Janet, who had picnicked with us on it and fished from its weathered boards, painted it. This is the picture I use on my desktop.

It was sad to see our old friend dismantled, but we knew it was inevitable.

It helps, I think, that it's our neighbours from Blair and Sons Sawmill who are doing the work. They do good work and, because our bridge is practically in their garden, they care about its appearance.

The old decking has already found a new home as a retaining wall on a nearby property, and the new decking is being nailed in place today.

This new bridge will weather soon enough, and yesterday Jack Blair, who is nine, fished off it, making him the third generation of his family on the bridge at the time and the first person to enjoy it in its new incarnation.

All in all it's been a relatively painless operation, and in time I imagine we'll become as attached to this bridge as we were to its predecessor. We should go down as soon as the decking is secured and toast it, to make it feel properly at home.

Falling Down, Falling Down

I have no illusions about living in the country. I don't see it through a rosy romantic glow. Who was the writer who wrote 'There is no hell like a small town'? There's the lack of privacy, the gossip, the suspicion of anything or anyone new, the unthinking clinging to tradition. You can't be considered a local unless you, and possibly one of your parents, were born there.

But we enjoy our own company, have the privacy of 200 acres, and a village within walking distance, so it works for us. And when we need help our neighbours are there for us, even if they consider us crazy mainlanders. With our bridge in bad shape one neighbour said we are welcome to park our car at her place and travel back and forward on our four wheel drive bike through her property to our house. And now our other neighbours have offered to rebuild the bridge at a fraction of the cost quoted to us by the professionals. They remember when it was first built, thirty years ago.

We have wonderful neighbours in the city too, and I'm sure they'd build bridges for us if we asked, it's just that maybe those bridges would be more metaphoric than practical.

In Search of Lost Goats

Goats are such escape artists. They find all the weak spots in your fences, or simply jump them, and then look surprised when they land on the other side. How did I get here? they say.

And when they've gone missing and you find them - or they find you - they look so innocent. Who me? they say.

Yesterday we went in search of a mob of fifteen that had breached the fence between our share-farmer neighbour and her neighbour, and then made their way via another neighbour's property in a long loop back into our sycamore forest.

We haven't really been panicked about them; this time of year when the leaves turn and fall there's plenty of feed in the forest for goats.

We didn't find them, but there can't be too many nicer ways to spend an autumn afternoon than tramping through paddocks, bush and forest with your fellow farmers. And we didn't come home empty handed: one of our neighbours has a laden pear tree he was happy to share with us. As for the goats, they're holidaying somewhere on our land and we'll look for them again later in the week.