Kissing My Landlord Goodbye

I have just ended 2017 on a high note. I move to the New Year without a landlord to call my own. I am not homeless. It’s just that I have put something up. It is what a lot of people would call a shack although I prefer to call it ‘My Beautiful Cottage’. It is not anything fancy. It comprises of one room with iron sheet walls with separate pit latrine and outdoor bathroom (the kind you have to visit with a basin and towel around your waist).

I have been living here for the last one week and while it has required some getting used to, it has the perfect ambience. I no longer have to listen to youthful neighbours play their cheap and noisy sound systems late into the night. I also don’t have to neighbours’ wives brawling with their husbands’ resident lovers. My lullaby now comprises of the rustling of grevillea, wattle, and eucalyptus leaves. I wake up to the singing of myriad birds. If I listen keenly enough, I can also hear tiny (and other not so tiny) insects scrambling out of their hidden burrows on the forest floor.

It is an exciting move although the journey has been rather strenuous on the pocket.

 

This is my former front door where my identity had been reduced to a number.

This is my new front door (the only one).

This is the scene I would see whenever I walked into my Landlord’s compound.

This is what I now wake up to every morning.

I would love to invite you for a meal in my beautiful home. However, you need to give me some time to restock my kitchen. As I have told you above, the move was not cheap.