kinsahaysblog.com

I travel and house sit, seeing new places and providing a service at the same time, living in beautiful homes for free but keeping them tidy, pull a few weeds and look after animals while the owners are away. I wrote a book last month! 50k word fiction. Now poems are popping out of me and I want to paint.  I’m making preserves with the fruit fallen in the spring winds and learning to blog.

This is a 3-month stint in the Bay of Plenty New Zealand. I look after Ebony, a lovely standard poodle and take her for walks twice daily in the avocado orchard next door. It’s spring here and I have a magnificent view of the daily weather changes over the Kaimai Ranges nearby. In the orchard, seasonal things happen – right now the shelter belts are being trimmed so they can’t harbour bacteria etc.

The tractor has a 4-circular saw gadget attached on a long extended arm that can move sideways along the belt or across the top. The driver is protected by a cage over the roof but it’s a noisy skilled job.

The graceful blue-green needle-foliage of the casuarina trees and the prickly resinous yellow-green foliage of Cryptomeria screech in protest at their fate, and large and small branches fall with a thud over the machine to the ground.  The air is perfumed with resin and the mess is piled thigh-high beside the shelter belts. soon it will be chipped to be returned to the land.