My partner and I have been in our new place for 6 weeks, but we only got our blinds yesterday. It is a totally new place, and blinds/curtains weren’t on the list of inclusions. We weren’t too happy with any of the options in Canberra, so we ended up getting blinds from a company based in Yass. Window coverings are one of those things which we take for granted. I’ve missed them - particularly because of how they help with both privacy and energy efficiency.
Some of our neighbours have put up sheets on their windows, but we never considered that. We really like our view - literally across the street is a nature reserve which stretches all the way to the New South Wales border. Growing up in Tasmania, I’ve always been interested in borders. When I lived in Minnesota, I used to enjoyed crossing the St. Croix River and visiting Wisconsin. It’s interesting that I’m now living in the Australian Capital Territory, a small enclave within NSW, where the border is always close by.
It’s dusk as I write this and I’m keeping an eye on the darkening grasslands across the street, which gradually becomes a low wooded rise. On some days, it’s possible to see dozens of kangaroos on the grasslands. I can’t see any today, they must be somewhere else in the reserve, or I just can’t see them.
I do a lot of bushwalking in the Mulligans Flat nature reserve. It’s not as flat as its name suggests. There’s a nice variety of terrain - from grassland to woodland (sparsely wooded areas) to forest. It’s amazing how many kangaroos I see during these walks. When they stand still, they blend into the landscape extremely well. If they think you can’t see them, you can get very close to them before they lose their nerve and jump away. When I do notice them, I often don’t make eye contact with them and pretend they’re not there. Sometimes when I do that, I can walk by, extremely close, and they don’t jump away.
But the weird thing about walking in Mulligans Flat - or in a lot of places in the Australian bush, for that matter - is that at any moment, there could be dozens of sets of eyes looking at you, observing you carefully, gauging how much of a threat you pose. It can be a bit disconcerting to be aware of the scale of this observation, so I usually decide to think about something else.
It’s now totally dark outside. I shut my blinds. After all, I don’t want any curious kangaroos from the nature reserve across the road to observe to the blogger is his natural habitat.
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