story with moral

28th August.

Saturday

F. too sick to go to soccer. None of us seem to mind too much. In fact all three of us are still in bed reading at 9 a.m. F: Deltora Quest, for the umpteenth time. D: the newspaper (about to dash into town for today’s papers with fresh supply of Suduko, crosswords), Me: a poetry book I bought at the Byron Writers Fest, ‘The Green Fuse’. It’s a modest little publication, Australian anthology edited by someone called Carmel Williams, who’s done a fabulous job (published by Picaro Press) 

Well-crafted, unpretentious, intellegent... I’ve been reading poems in bed every night,  A few cool mouthfuls of fresh sorbet after the evening binge of scratchy-eyed blog-gluttony .

  

small story with moral:

ON my morning walk, one of the variations, I go up the dead-end road behind our house. I like looking at the houses and imagining what sort of people live there.

There’s an overgrown rainbow-flags-out-the-front, handpainted hippy place ; there’s a cruise-y kid-city  place with  basketball ring nailed to tree, bicycles flung on the lawn, soccerball lying  the road. There’s the anal-retentives’ place with everything in the garden trimmed to within an inch of its life. 

And then there is the place I think of as The Drug Dealers'. At the Drug Dealers’ place, there are two or three big black dogs who go into a barking frenzy from behind the wire fence whenever I walk past. As well as ‘No Trespassing’ and  ‘Guard dogs on duty’ signs, there is a sliding metal grille gate which warns of ‘injury or death’ if opened. I reckon they probably have a huge crop of hydroponic mariuana growing in the sheds out the back. A stash of firearms. Maybe a dead  body or two buried in the yard. 

Sometimes I walk in the other direction - down the hill, to where our road meets the slightly larger road along the valley. There is a cluster of letterboxes on the corner. I’m down there, early Saturday morning. Golden light through the long grass, cows moo-ing, swamp hens squawking in the swamp etc. The swamp is extra swampy because it’s been raining heavily.  Because the ground is so wet, my rickkety old letterbox has keeled over. 

I’m trying inneffectually to jam the pole back into the muddy ground, when a ute pulls up and a bloke in an old cow cockie hat says, ’Need a hand there love?’ Before I know it, he’s whipped a star picket out of the back of the ute, whacked it into the ground and attatched everything with fencing wire, all neatly clipped and upright.

I gush gratitude and rattle on about how wonderful it is to encounter good old fashioned country neighbourly-ness etc. We swap names, shake hands, He tells me he used to have a farm out west, but now they’ve moved closer to town, just up the hill actually - ‘Y’know, the house with the dogs?’

One of the big black dogs (Boots, Blossom?) is grinning aimiably from the back of the ute.

When I get home I tell Den. ‘Yeh’, he says, unsurprised, glancing up from his Suduko, ’His wife’s really nice too. She works in the bank in town’