The people in this village are really strange, not all of them, as I have met some good, hardworking families, but a lot of them just never do anything in or around their houses. In a lot of cases they will let the houses go to ruin, and when a wall gives, and tumbles down, they would just vacate that room, and live happily in the ones still standing, until it was impossible to go on.
There is one very quaint place in our main road, and every time I pass it, I expected another room to have caved in. It was a typical Haarlem built, one of the long ones, with the rooms all in a row, making it possible to rent it out as rooms, in which a whole family sometimes lived. This one, with one room already flattened, was recently painted a sickly pink, I suppose to cover the raw clay bricks, as the biggest reason for so many walls caving in was the exposed bricks, as nobody would ever replaster the walls, leaving everything open to the elements.
In Haarlem of course anything goes, and it looked quite beautiful, but at least they had stopped further damage, and hopefully the house stood for another few years. It is such a pity, as a lot of the houses are historical, and protected by the Cultural and Historical laws, but nothing is ever done to protect them.
The best one to me was still the orange house! Also on the main road, almost across from the pink house, a family had decided to renovate their little house, and I every time I passed there, I saw the guy and his son bussily working, and when I came back from Scotland that year, my eyes got a shock, not only for the reason that the house was beautifully restored, but the colour! It was painted a bright, bright kind of light burnt orange!
Gary had built up the caved-in wall of the old water mill, as the bodies responsible had never even tried to do anything to protect it, but the roof was stolen off, and it is now just a ruin, with the old mill open to the elements.
I think people saw me as one very mad and strange woman, as they would stop on passing by and I was busy painting, or patching up, or working in my garden, and just stood looking at me as if I was exhibit one!
Another house that was actually saved for a while, as the occupant had built up the fallen wall, and had lived in the semi ruin for quite a few years now. But on passing the other day, I saw that the wall, that was built up with pieces of bricks and stuff from another fallen house, had started to kind of lean dangerously to the outside. This was now propped up with a few poles, and the lot living there looked as happy as ever.
I was quite busy in my garden, and as Emil was so happy when outside, I parked his push cart in the shade every morning, and tried to get my veggie garden sorted. I was putting boxes down, with chicken wire underneath, as the bally moles were going crazy, and wherever I put my feet down, I sunk away into their tunnels. It was very frustrating, and I usually went quite beserk if I found my newly planted seedlings all wilted and no soil underneath them.