Seven days later

It's 9:00 and the bells have just stopped ringing.  It reminds me that we've now been here a week - there's bell-ringing practice in the church every Wednesday night from 7:30 to 9:00 and, as we live only a few doors down from the church, I imagine this will be a feature of our lives for the next few years.

It doesn't seem to bother the children much - I told them the first night that the bells were the church singing them to sleep.  We find it charming.  Other neighbours, including one who gave us our first Midsomer moment, warning us that "some of [the bell ringers] aren't very nice people."

In the fictionalised version of our Oxfordshire village, the bell-ringer will be either a murderer or a suspect within 10 minutes

 

So where are we after a week?  All the boxes are unpacked.  All of our rooms are habitable, save one.  Don't come stay with us just yet.  Unless you like the "surrounded by random bits of furniture, books, and linens" chic.  We have visited the playground, the wild garden, Chipping Norton, and Witney.  We may visit Oxford very soon.

 

The house, though, still feels like a holiday home.  It's good and bad that way - it's beyond gorgeous here, but it doesn't feel like mine, even with all the furniture and my new consolation mixer from when I was having a low moment (I am weak and don't want to have to clean up buttercream dust ever again).

 

It's so pretty, I am almost afraid to use it.

 

We're off on holidays soon, then the children will start at their respective schools (Itsyboo is starting preschool two mornings a week - I will have six free hours to do whatever I want.  It's heady).

 

I clearly need to sort our a few more mundane things like hanging pictures, etc.  But I think we're slowly getting there.  It's funny to rent again after ten years owning my own homes - I actually have big mirrors now, and paintings and TVs to mount on the wall and grown up stuff that we didn't have before. 

 

It's both reassuring and stressful to think how I'm going to put all the pieces together.  But until then, I'm going to enjoy the fire in my fireplace (with smoke* - going up the chimney of course), drink a glass of red wine, and soak it all in.





*Texan readers - in London, you can't burn fuels that produce smoke in order to avoid the killing smog of the 1950s.  The fact that we can is a sign that we're really out in the country now.