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.
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