the drought breaks

I got  back yesterday from eight days in Melbourne & Central Victoria. 

First morning  there I wrote:

Familiar Melbourne, my old home town. Big City where I lived for thirty five years. You brought the good weather with you, they say. I left torrential rain up north, arrived  to crystal blue. Actually that isn’t quite true. There is always a haziness  nowadays, not the pure blue sky of my childhood. 

Melbourne's front gardens are bursting with colour. Plants I had forgotten about  in the nearly sixteen years since I left. Daisies and lavender and roses and lilac and that bright blue bush  and those bright purple poker shaped things. Everything radiant and fragrant after the long-awaited rains, the long cold winter, and now the spring sunshine. There is a faint dusty smell of the plane trees in their bright green October foliage. I remember this time of year, those bright green shoots after the interminable Melbourne winter, when the trees are bare and bleak for months on end. 

I have been bleak and grey myself, these last weeks. A bit mad really. Stressed is the term, I guess. I was so upset about...all sorts of relatively minor things that triggered major reactions. Dukkha, suffering. I have a giant cold sore erupting on my lip. Like a neon sign flashing ‘stress’

But now I am in dear old Melbourne and feeling sane again, thank God. 

This morning after Deb went off to work at 7.30 a.m. I went for a walk around her neighbourhood, along the railway line, up one of the plane tree-lined streets full of spring flower gardens, to a place I never visited  before: Darebin Parklands.

I felt like I was in the bush. I found myself by a creek, sitting on a rock by a small waterfall, watching a black and white cormorant perched on a log sticking out of the water. It had its wings spread to dry in the sun. The cool air smelt fresh as lemons. Until a few months back, when the rain came, I suppose this place was dusty and dry. Now it’s full of life. 

I thought of something my friend S said last week. He lives by a gorgeous rainforest, but was talking about the idea of moving south, because, he said ‘I’m not really a rainforest person - the country I love is eucalypt forest’.

At the time, sitting in his kitchen,  I thought, ‘Not me. Give me palm trees and deep green and whip birds calling through the shady caverns of the rainforest. Even more, give me beach, rolling breakers. Or the ochre and purple landscape of Central Australia’

I’ve always felt a bit oppressed by drab grey eucalypts. They evoke memories of outer suburban childhood, and dull family picnics, overcast Melbourne weekends.

But this morning I suddenly felt something different, that comforting feeling of deep familiarity. A bit like how I felt chatting with Deb last night - we have known each other almost forty years.

I could feel my battered spirits reviving as I walked through the parklands. Like the earth reviving after the long drought. The grass was glittery with early morning dew. That special kind of silence of rock and gum tree was seeping into me. Out somewhere at the distant perimeter of the parklands, the rising tide ocean sound of morning traffic , punctuated by occasional sirens and screeches. All so familiar.  

                                                       

                                                         

A week later, I’ve had my fill of conversations and city-business and  I’m ready to go home to my little family & the village in the green hills. As the plane swings in low over the sea and across the coast to land at Coolangatta, I look down on violet jacaranda trees glowing  among dark moist greenery and palm trees, red roofs, turquoise backyard pools. And I feel glad to be home, back in the subtropics where I belong. For now, at least. 

weather patterns

Holidays over. First day back at school. It feels like winter again. Ugg boots, doonas and radiators all pulled out of the cupboard where I stashed them prematurely during that blast of summer heat a few weeks back. Did those sweltering days really happen or did we just imagine them? Internal weather also has been grey and  overcast since return from the beach. 

When J turned up this morning for marimba group and said “How are you?”, my answer was ‘”I’m crap!” “Yeah, me too!” she said and we both laughed and that was the beginning of feeling better. 

I put the roses she brought me in a vase. They are the lovely home-grown sort, imperfect, assorted sizes and colours, with big mean thorns, and glorious old-fashioned perfume: a thing of beauty in the midst of domestic chaos. 

We are in the middle of getting the deck sanded and re-coated. I had hoped it would be done when we got back from holidays but because of the interminable rain, the final coat is still not on and all the outdoor furniture is shoved inside. Plus the coffee table and lamp are pulled away from the wall and the carpet rolled back because we had a flood of water inside yesterday in that corner. 

So I am living in mess. I think of myself as an orderly, even a slightly  obsessive person,  domestically. But right now I am averting my eyes from it all. I’ve even let the washing up accumulate today. It’s a sort of  experiment in laziness. 

Anyway J and I had tea and cake and agreed about how we hate the school day grind, harrying our kids off in the morning. We also laughed about  how  crazy we get with our husband/partner. And how fast it can all change. Yep I say, I can be feeling like I just can't stay in the relationship a moment longer, then an hour later he’s playing the ukulele, jamming with our son on the clarinet, and all is sweet and harmonious in our happy little household. 

Plus he’s made me  roll around laughing by phoning up on the mobile last night pretending to be a Vietnamese chef called Ling and telling me he will be serving Vietnamese ricepaper rolls for dinner. Which he does, and they are delicious. J and I agreed that  we seem to be pretty much stuck with our respective blokes after all these years, and that you just have to let it all go past like the weather. After a while you recognise the familiar weather patterns. 

Then we all played marimbas - an African piece -  and the black cloud that had been hanging around me since getting back from hols was blown away. Someone told me the other day (no kidding) about some form of therapy called ‘Pleasant Activity Therapy’ (PAT?) Well marimbas and a good chat and a laugh does it for me. 

This is a picture of a rainbow after a storm when we were up  at the beach house last week.

I want chooks

It’s the only thing worth doing really, says G, as we survey her vast,  flourishing vegetable garden. Growing food. Yes, I  eagerly agree. And learning to get along with people, I add. She doesn’t comment on that. G told me long ago that she prefers birds to human beings. 

As usual I mumble something about how I really must get around to getting a proper vegetable garden going. I have a sense of personal failure, fraudulence, about my lack of vegetable garden. ( our vast expanse of  self-sown Italian parsley and un-killable pumpkin vines doesn’t count )   

I also feel a vague sense of anxiety. Global food shortages, imminent  planetary catastrophe etc. ( i.e. ongoing planetary catastophe finally finding its way into our little backwater) 

G. sends me off with a basket of greens and eggs from her chooks. Chooks, I really want chooks.

M&M, who I visit at lunchtime (it’s a social day) have chooks too. And a fabulous food-producing garden. Our lunch of veg curry and salad is mostly home grown.

A few weeks back I went down to the local community garden  and rented a small plot. It is flat and sunny (unlike the garden at home)  and a manageable size. I was  all wild enthusiasm and inspiration. Joined up, paid up, and haven’t been back since. It has been school holidays etc. Plenty of excuses. 

It’s one of my two resolutions for when we get home next week: Start on veg garden.

Because I know I have to do it. Get my hands in the dirt again. Grow things. It is the sanest thing I can do. G looks way better than when I last saw her six months ago. She seems more alive. She reckons quitting previous stressful activities ( working, performing, teaching)  and getting back to gardening has restored her physical and mental health. 

another bird story

I planted a banksia tree next to the verandah here. This was many years ago now - not long after my mother died. The seedling  grew and when after a few years it was a spindly tree a metre or so high, a bird made her nest in it. Soon there were three eggs.

One sunny spring day as I was pottering about inside folding laundry, the mother bird flew right into the house through the open double doors. She circled once around my head and flew out again. I followed her outside and saw that her babies had hatched.

Alas, this story has a sad ending. The chicks did not survive. They vanished overnight a few days later.  

And fifteen years later the banksia tree, which is now  thick-trunked, ten metres high and holding up one end of the clothes line,  is dying. I don’t know why. I’d imagined  us growing old together, that tree and me. It would be scattering it’s dappled shade and bristly yellow flowers over the verandah where I sat peacefully in my old lady rocking-chair, meditating upon the ocean. The banksia would be still be here after I was gone, with the yellow tail black cockatoos feeding noisily in its branches... 

Life and death seem to arrive so  randomly  sometimes. Just to remind us of impermanence. 

bird story

Last night I was sitting by the window in the bedroom, emailing at the  desk my mother bought me forty years ago to do my homework on. Home by myself with the sound of the sea, feeling lonely. 

My eye was caught by a faint movement in the darkness behind the slatted blinds. A furry, feathery rustling. Black shiny eyes, alert. A mouse? No, it is a tiny bird, perched on the ridge where the window slides open. A honey eater with needle-sharp beak, grasping with claws as fine as black thread. It is nestled in the cosy space between window and blind. Roosting for the night, I guess. Do I need to do anything about this situation? The bird looks so settled in. My little companion. I decide to leave him or her there until the morning.

I keep on with my computer. The phone rings, it's my friend S, with a whole heap of stuff to report. I mention the bird to her - it's been sitting quietly all this time. She says better to release it now, or put it in a box and release it in the morning. I'm anticipating a distressing struggle, wild flapping of delicate wings, anxious beating of hearts. 

When I get off the phone I gather a box, lined with newspaper, and a towel. The bird seems slightly more active now. I open the window, lean in under the blind and enclose the feather-light body easily in my hand, with the towel.  I will give it the option of flying away: I hold it gently outside the window and  open the towel. The bird flutters lightly off to freedom, and I hope to  shelter for the night.

early morning treasures from the sea:

On the beach, a strange blob: bright turquoise-with-black-leopardskin-markings. Is it part of a fish, with it’s head recently bitten off? Or maybe a sort of squid?

A couple of kids and a woman  join me standing around this mysterious sea-tossed  thing.   We stare down at it.  A treasure laid out  on shiny fresh washed sand. The ocean ruffles her white petticoats  besides us. Joggers thump past. 

After thirty years walking up and down this beach I can still be surprised - and often am - when the ocean casts something ashore  that I have never seen before. Its a cuddle fish says one of the little kids, poking it with a thong. We flip it over. Yes, she’s right, some sort of squid, milky white underneath. Then a wave tosses it over again. The creature is still pulsing faintly as its  colour fades.

I continue on my walk, up the beach to the National Park. My bare feet negotiate the narrow track, careful of rocks and tree roots.  I sit on the high cliff top. Wind rattles the banksias and  shakes the she-oaks. The ocean thrashes on the rocks below. All this agitation, but the sun warm and steady and the birds tweetlling cheerily  in the bushes. 

I see whales. There are a  couple of them flapping about and spouting and waving their flippers and tails and thwacking up great white splashes in the dark blue halfway to the horizon. I am  comforted  to know they are living their lives out there in the ocean-world. Doing what they do every year, making their journey north from Antarctica. Giving birth at Platypus Bay up near  the northern end of Fraser Island. 

Once I was on a tourist boat up there and a couple of whales came right up to us. The boat turned off  its motor and there was a sudden peaceful silence as we rocked with the waves. A  sort of time-warp enchantment seemed to settle on us all. The great ocean creatures nudged our vessel. We had eye-contact. We humans lost track of time. Finally the whales  swam off  and we returned to normal consciousness. The whales I saw this morning would be heading back south to Antarctica with their calves for summer. 

alone in the universe

F is spending the next couple of  nights with two of his cousins up from Melb, and  D and D’s sister. They are all  up on the Range. I spent the day there with them today, drove back down here to the beach tonight. Noticing, as the last rays of the sun turned the rainforest  to luminous golden green, that I felt a little sad to be driving off and leaving them all. I could have stayed if I wanted to. But chose this solitude back at the beach house instead. 

The feeling of bereft-ness that brushed my heart  was something I recognise. It is always like this when I separate from my little family. There is a period of mourning -  it lasts somewhere between five minutes and a  couple of days. Then some sort of internal re-adjustment takes place and I remember that I love being alone and delight in my own company. And then it is time to rejoin them, another clunky gear-change. 

Driving back I heard on the car radio that  scientists have discovered a planet  that they think might be a bit like Earth - similar size, temperature etc. And only twenty light years away.

Are we alone in the universe? seemed to be the theme. It’s touching, somehow. There was also some expert bloke toying with the fanciful idea that we might be able to sometime  go and live on this other planet. Maybe. If we could figure out how to get there. If it had the right sort of air for us to breathe.  Also half this planet is always in the dark, the other half always turned to its sun-star , so we’d have to adapt to living on the in-between-bit.

What, is this in case we completely trash the planet we’ve already been given? Or just feel like a change of scene?

Personally, I’ll stick with Planet Earth. I’d rather go down with the ship.

I stop at the awful shopping centre on the way home, because I am not quite ready to face the empty house and the mournful old sound of the sea. It’s late night shopping, but very quiet. I reckon the only thing more depressing than a raucous crowded school holidays shopping centre is an almost empty night time shopping centre. Cavernous, sterile, artificially - lit. I bought a casserole dish, some socks for F, a  soap holder. Then home via the video shop.

The dear old  house has been full of  people these last few days. Kids up and down the stairs, toast crumbs on the bench, suncream and hats everywhere, beach towels and bathers draped over the verandah railings, sand on the bathroom floor. Voices coming up from the beach, the outside shower going. Sandcastles built and washed away. Excited sightings of whales and dolphins with everyone out on the deck, passing the binoculars. 

Now  everyone is  gone, and the sound of the sea comes back in to fill the house and lull me to sleep.