a story with pictures

When I first met dutch husband he was half way through building a house.

[the home above, was built by dutch husband. he did all the carpentry work, inside and out]
When we married, we moved into the house, settled in, started a garden and I decided it needed a name. Dutch husbands favourite movie (or one of them) was Casablanca, so I chose that as a name, even though the house was not white [eventually we did paint the house white, with blue trim so that it could live up to its name]
Then we moved after about 8 yrs there ~ during those 8 years, our darling daughter was born ~ Sophie ~ [who you can see in the above photo. I think she is eating a banana] ~ these were some of the best years of my life
we moved from acres of land to a cul-de-sac and built our dream home (or so we thought)

a bagged Georgian style mansion.[sorry about the quality of photo above, it is scanned]
Complete with every single thing that one girl could need in this modern world. And I hated it. I knew from the time I slept there the very first night, that it was not my home ~ it was just a house.. being new, to me it had no soul.. we stayed there a year to the day of moving in [i later found out that i the land had been an aboriginal site of some kind, which could explain the odd energies that i often felt]

[in the photo above, you can get the gist of what the home was like. ~ lots of cottage flowers, lots of collectables. we just did not fit into the area with our eccentric tastes]

Oneday dutch husband was looking for an old home to buy and renovate to sell and he took me to see this little ramshackle cottage…run down, flea and cat infested house. An over grown garden with a backbone of established trees. And I fell in love. The ancient apple tree in the backyard, clinched it for me…

and so began Inglewood.
[I do have some photos of the house when we first bought it.. but cannot find them at the moment, I am sure they will be discovered while I am packing - oh my lord! packing, I didn't think of that!!]

I do believe my job is done here at Inglewood.. I came and tended the garden, bringing magick into it, welcoming the nature divas back, creating a haven for those elementals, for the butterflies, the lizards, birds and dragonflies. I have planted a healing disc under the old pine tree and gridded the property with crystal energies.. and now it is time to move on. To create another haven at my new home.
what an adventure! the name? I do have one chosen but that is a story maybe for tomorrow!!