The daily walk

Every day I make K come for a walk past the new house. He groans a bit then concedes and off we go. It's about six minutes up the road, then we pass over the boundary into the magical forest and I feel we are "there".

This is the boundary I crossed a few weeks ago, after our house was sold, and we were moving to New Zealand. But then I entered the forest realm and knew we had to stay. A few days later I went to look at a house that looks like a new build but is after all a little Victorian cottage. It has a tiny garden and I said no way am I living in a house that's had its garden subdivided. So I went home and looked up the old land registry and the garden has always been tiny. So I emailed our agent secretly and went to see the house the next day.

In the meantime I downloaded all the house photos, fed them into chat and restyled all the rooms using our current furniture, got him to add a load of apples, almonds and roses into the garden, swap out the paint and put slate onto the 1970s annexe roof. I know I wasn't supposed to but I showed the agent and I guess he knew we would be buying the house from then on.

K hated it and tried to talk me out of it. We were about to up sticks and move to an island 4 hours ferry from Auckland to a house my instincts were telling me was a very bad landslide risk. With an astonishingly beautiful view. Plenty of budding breweries, craftspeople and excellent gen x future friends. But the forest was saying otherwise.

I messaged M and said I need to talk to the village wise woman. She immediately talked me out of the Great Barrier idea. Daughter wants to go to csm now – she needs somewhere to come home to to have lunch cooked for her on a Sunday. Other daughter will be home eventually, from NZ. Not quite time to leave, but with the forest is there ever really a time to leave?