Pollen dust covers the ramp and steps in the mornings. A fine yellow carpet that floats and settles near the door of the classroom. Dried and warm like sweet grass-seed, the smell carries me to the bush and the days of Gina.
We kept her in a paddock that lay across the road from home. A dusky brown heifer with the island of Tasmania in a splash of white across her muzzle. There had been others before her. Clarabelle first, then Mammy and Velvet, but Gina was the queen. Her walk set her apart. An unhurried stepping, like a ship on legs. Mum kept a diary, a small brown book where she marked our milestones such as baptisms, when we started school or who got whooping cough. Gina’s doings were listed there as well, under C for cow. La Lolla, Dad named her, but we called her Gina.
I was 10 when I began walking across by myself to get her. I wore Dad’s gumboots and carried a stick. I felt brave then, ready to hit a snake or ward off a magpie. Sometimes she’d be standing close to the gate just waiting, staring at the bowlers on the smooth square greens on the opposite side of the fence. Other days she’d be lying among the tussocks and I’d wander the maze of paths that ran towards the football ground, calling until I found her. She’d lead the way back, rocking her weight in even time along the tracks to home.
We milked her in the shed, on a concrete patch in the corner where Dad had built a bail. I had the morning shift and when it was cold I watched as steam poured from her nostrils and left watery drops on the bristles near her mouth. I bolted the plank in behind her ear, caught her tail on the nail above and tied back her leg with the cord. Each milking we gave her a handful of hay and filled her bucket with water. While she ate or drank or just stood mashing her cud, I washed the swollen udder that hung like a bag of puffy fingers below her belly. I leant against her and listened to the rumble and gurgle of milk running like a river inside. The hair just above her udder was softer and there was a secret space between the bag and her leg, a little warm pouch where my hand fitted perfectly. She’d give a sudden kick and I’d remember the milking. With the bucket held between my knees I tilted it towards the wall and started. Two pin-straight lines hit the tin and within minutes a creamy froth rose up the sides and the bucket felt warm and heavy against my legs.
Gina made milk and calves. Every year we took her to visit the bull at Davies’ farm. It was a two-mile walk we called The Long March. Dad drove the car at walking pace while we crouched down low in the back seat and held the rope that was looped round her neck. People slowed and watched as the little procession moved through the streets, past the town hall and on to the highway. “Where’s the circus?” or “Get a horse!” they yelled. We were ashamed. Dad wasn’t; he just laughed and idled the car along, his arm angled like a paddle out the window.
We left her at the farm in the front paddock where the black bull stood watching, then, after a week, returned to bring her home. She didn’t remember us. She wanted to stay. We jammed the rope in the window and held on with all our might, but as the car started up so did the bull. All along the dirt road we heard him, a hoarse angry bellowing backed by a chorus of mooing. It wasn’t until the highway that the air quietened, Gina stopped pulling against the rope and it was safe to pat her through the window. The car dropped into second gear as she padded the gravel beside the bitumen and I listened to the rhythm in her hooves.
The arrival of a calf each year was recorded in Mum’s tiny script. “On July 16th ’66, to Gina and Horace another little bull calf. Both doing fine.” Motherhood was a brief experience, however, and after a week the farmer would come and take it away. We watched the splay-footed creature calling out from the back of the ute and when I lay in bed at night I heard Gina’s sore and lonely cries carrying across the road like a broken trumpet.
In my last year at school she died. My brother found her lying by the gate with her feet sideways in the air, a piece of fence wire dangling from her mouth. Maybe she knew what was coming. The following month the bowling club expanded and her paddock became a car park. She was the last cow we kept. The small country that lay across the road became the land I never visited.
Until this year and this tree. The tree that towers over the portable classroom where I teach. The one that drops seeds and pollen dust that crisps in the sun and scents the air with a smell like hay. The one that brings back the queen and her country again.
Meditation on mowing
As a child I lived opposite a bowling club. Every morning the gardener moved across the kitchen window cutting, rolling or watering the grass. Preparing the greens. The smoke from his cigarette floated above him like small grey signals coming out of his hat. I envied him. Nothing in the day except that green path and in the distance the Strezlecki ranges, a blue smudge on the horizon.
I loved being in the garden and in my last year at school, the back yard behind the shed became the quietest place on earth. Fruit trees, a vegetable patch, the chooks’ pen and me. In the afternoons when I finished milking the cow I stood there for a while by myself and wondered about things.
Now, half a lifetime later, I mow for meditation. Up and down, over and across I circuit the yard with the pad of a slow dance. When I first started I used to follow a pattern. I’d cut the grass in long straight lines winding back and forth from top to bottom and side to side until the grass had been cut, the yard clear, the job done. Then I branched out. I started making shapes like rectangles, squares, ovals and cricket pitches. I stopped thinking it was a chore and thought of it as something else. A release for the mind.
It’s like cutting the kid’s hair. Five different heads, thick, wispy, curly, straight and spiky. Whorls and crowns, cowlicks and fringes. When they were little I bought fine steel scissors and learnt to trim and shape. They sat on a chair in the kitchen or if it was fine we went outdoors. I knelt and stooped behind them. Snip comb snip as I listened to their chatter or told stories to keep them still. Fifteen years in the trade until they tired of my slowness and went off to hairdressers and I lost my job. I stopped cutting until I discovered the mower.
I push the machine under the ivy and remember the morning we found the puppies. Ten tiny bodies wriggling in the dark warmth and in the mother’s eyes a brightness that surprised me. I mow behind the tool shed and see the place where the kids found a blackbird’s nest. In the middle of some bougainvillea hanging over the back fence they propped up a ladder and took turns spying on the eggs. I notice too there’s a mixture of grasses to explore. A patch of baby tears by the bedroom windows, thin seedy blades under the clothesline and spongy thickness near the apricot tree.
I met the man from across the road when I started mowing. I watched in the beginning as he pushed the machine across the nature strip and rolled the mower over and over the lawn whilst his son waited for him on the driveway. Not many weeks later the boy took over the mowing and his father walked around and picked up twigs that had blown off the trees. He dropped them on the footpath or placed them in little heaps amongst the shrubs. It was then that I learnt he had Alzheimer’s disease. As the months went by I saw him often wandering by himself, sometimes in his pyjamas standing by the letter box. He didn’t know me any more. And then a gardening service appeared and the boy told me his dad had moved into a hostel.
The last place I mow is beneath the ash tree with its roots running all over the place like fingers groping up through the earth. The blades grind the tops of the wood with gashes and bruises and after that it’s finished. The lawns are done. I stand underneath the clothes line and watch the birds sifting and scattering. It’s then that I remember the girl who stood behind the shed in the afternoons with a question in her head. The answer’s always green.
kate cahill
