What Brother John has been up to

This is the first fire in the outdoor oven Brother John built in our backyard in Christchurch, New Zealand. It has been a labour of agitation, shock, and determination, grounded in love for a city’s sudden demise and the rebirth of opportunities between a brother and sister after many years in the darkness. A fire is perfect that forges new memories with the old to create something awesome out of devastation.

In the beginning, there was a home that had been acquired that did not meet up to our expectations because we had to downsize for economic reasons. We were only partially moved into our home the week of the first earthquake in September, 2010. Suddenly, there was even more chaos than we ourselves provide. Nature had begun to redecorate our household, lifestyles and define what our needs truly are. Now more than ever, access to fire became very important for warmth, cooking, light and that feeling that only fire can bring a reflection for the soul’s deepest contemplations.

In November, my husband and I went to America to visit friends and family and contemplate whether we stay in Christchurch or move somewhere else. We came back to Christchurch and began trying to pretend September never happened, then, February, 2011, came and gone was any pretence that the place we had chosen for our home had to be tremendously renegotiated, recreated and still always in the back of our minds, relocated as well. Brother John, being a builder and a mason, decided to come from America and visit Christchurch, New Zealand and see what he could do to help us all.

Unfortunately, at this writing, there is no real re-building going on in Christchurch, just mostly demolition. Much of the historical and should I say hysterical buildings are rubble now, not just from the natural disasters that happened, but from the chaos that happens when things are more than anyone or even a collective of everyone can handle, machines of all kinds move in and crunch and munch without planning and contemplation. Herein, was born the agitation we felt as we witnessed perfectly sound building materials being hauled to the dump.

With nothing to do and nowhere to go, and a profound fear of even being inside our own home, we began to collect bricks being thrown away and committed to building a kitchen outside our home that would function without the power society has forced us to become so dependent upon, electricity.

These were our building blocks, our thoughts were committed, we would use what everyone else was throwing away and create a safe space to utilize, and something that would bring us comfort, as well as a desire to even stay...

Foundations were laid....
And the first walls we began to form were for our vegetable garden, something most people have in Christchurch, The Garden City. Our vegetables, which had been living in old recycle bins, made obsolete by a new scheme for recycling implemented just prior to the earthquakes wherein each household received three bins on wheels, one for rubbish, one for recyclable paper, metal and glass and one for green stuff that really belongs on your garden anyway, but nonetheless, an almost perfect plan gone awry in the aftermath of chaos. But, leaving very portable bins from the old scheme of recycling that were just right for portable gardens for people like us, forced to move too much in order to find our economic stability in times of recession., we still had access to our own home grown vegetables and fruit trees. We just moved them with us; however, Brother John begins to alleviate the movable feast, by starting the first column...

Brother John eventually gets rid of that clothesline you may see in the picture and that is a pretty good story in its own right, it began our running banter about ‘Caveman language’, to be explained later.

One column became four pretty fast, not unlike the language.

Anyway, these were days of running around Christchurch City very close to our home and meeting strangers who never wanted to see another brick as long as they lived. But, we felt comfortable with our bricks, because a Caveman was building it. And Cavemen, build STRONG. And strong people recycle everything!!!


And put light stuff over your head.

And, sometimes hold their own heads....

And leave their unique stamp on things.

And use whatever they have available even if it does make them speak in unique languages.

IT is all worth it in the end...

But, it’s not over yet...there is always more....

Cleanliness

I usually post the virtue of the week on Monday, Tuesday at the latest, but since this week has been Cleanliness, and I have quite literally been cleaning everything needed to be cleaned since the first earthquake on September 4th, 2010 wherein we were in the middle of a major move of house, and well, as one might comprehend, nothing has been done since then. Except of course to clean up the primary mess of the February 22nd, 2011 earthquake to keep from walking across shards of glass and pottery, it is Friday now, and still, there is much to clean, but there sure as hell is a big dent in it, thanks to Brother John.


When in a cleaning dilemma, it sure helps to bring in someone fresh to the space, they see through the lens of someone who just sees a mess, not the despair that made it happen. We tackled the garage, or ‘girge’ according to Brother John imitating a Kiwi accent. Brother John has been lost in translation of late, when a ‘skip’ is supplied for ‘dumpster’ and a ‘prawn’ for ‘shrimp’, but Brother John will agree we have been feeding him well, as we throw out what we finally need to throw out in the pursuit of Cleanliness.

Meanwhile, we have been building too, utilizing the many bricks plopped on the side of the road from fallen chimneys, walls, and buildings whose demolition might not have been complete by natural disasters, now bull-dozed without contemplation from many angles, just a ‘bring her down’ attitude that prevails in an unequally ruled world. We still live in a police state here, but as of yet, we can recycle bricks until they discover we have been building something without their permission. So, what are we building?

An outdoor kitchen, with a fireplace, that isn’t allowed either if there are solid walls, but actually acceptable if there are none, and there is no fire ban on. Go figure, there are always loopholes for a lady with an urge for fire, being a ‘fire starter’ is something of a natural lineage that runs deep within me, some primordial urge, grown more urgent when a person feels safer outside than inside a building, like we do in the earthquake territory we now know we have chosen to live in unawares. It’s important to stand beside a fire every once in awhile and contemplate what’s the next move. Especially, when you are done with the Cleanliness routine, not to be mean, but just wondering if Ben Franklin ever cleaned his own dishes?