shades of grey

                          

                          

                          

A brief moment at the beach house. Dashed up for the weekend and met with our friend K, a builder. He walked around the property with me, suggesting how to patch up/restore/revive the old place. ‘Of course’ he said, ‘It’s well past it’s use-by date, but you know that don’t you” 

Yes, I know that I’m ‘overcapitalising’. And that the ‘rational’ thing to do would be knock it down and re-build. But I don’t want to do that. 

The four of us - K, his wife M, D & I sit on the verandah, drinking tea & eating the naughty cakes they brought us. Catching up on family and friend gossip, and talking about how scary the world feels right now, our little home-planet all bucking and wobbling and writhing. I’m thinking about how a tsunami here would reduce the beach house to matchsticks in a minute. 

“We are so tiny and insignificant in the face of Nature” we say.

“Everything feels so fragile”

And, “At least with this earthquake , it’s not caused by us humans, it’s the Earth herself...”

But someone’s Facebook post said we humans may have contributed to the cataclysm:

...Global warming causes the pressure on the tectonic plates to shift from the poles to the equator. The tectonic plates slip (Christchurch) and then readjust (Japan) and then, as earthquakes usually follow in threes, readjust again. San Francisco? Los Angeles?

Could this be true?

And on the Slow Love Life blog (from CBS News site) I read that 

... the entire earth has actually lost a fraction of its daily spin through the sky. Scientists calculate that the length of day on earth has been shortened by the trauma of the quake. The coast of Japan has moved eight feet. 

What can we do but tremble in fear, and pray for suffering humanity?

And keep living our lives. Which, though clouded by the knowledge of elsewhere tragedies, are still going along as ever.

Late arvo we stroll along the beach. Everything is tones of silver and grey & white, including our four heads of hair, tousled by the autumn wind.

F has been at neighbours’ place, hanging out with a couple of girls he’s known since they were all in nappies at  Little Fishes Playgroup. We encounter the three of them, gawky adolescents mooching along the beach. The girls in short shorts. New pimples and self-consciousness. We exchange greetings with the kids and keep walking in our opposite directions. 

Of course to me it seems like barely yesterday they were little toddlers and we mothers were helping them with their plastic spades and telling them not to throw sand at eachother.