Autumn is here. As crisp as a new season apple. Summer’s endless sweaty humidity has evapourated into bright skies. “What a cracker of a day!” says D, stepping out beneath the pink cascade of the flowering vine over the front door. Laundry flutters and dries on the line. My body slips cosily into clothes, into jumpers and socks.
The other day I walked up the hill with my dear friend J, who was visiting from the Gold Coast. She was waxing lyrical about the rural feeling here and the lovely lonely late afternoon autumn light filtering through the eucalypts. Said it reminded her of her childhood in South Africa. She said that remembered landscape was always somehow ‘home’ for her, even though she would never live there again.
I told her how I’d missed the European Autumn of Melbourne when I first moved up here to the subtropics seventeen years ago. I almost burst into tears once, when I saw a solitary Liquidamber blazing crimson against the rainforest green near Maleny.
J said she experienced the same thing in reverse when first settling in Australia, in Melbourne. Scuffling crispy brown leaves on footpaths, then the long bleak season of naked branches, elms and plane trees, grey skies, it all made her feel homesick.
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