going in circles

taking her out..

2011-11-26T21:39:00.000+11:00

My mother puts her foot sideways on the front step, holds onto my arm and waits. We are going out for the morning. Down goes her right foot then her left. She's slightly unbalanced then steadies and off we go across the verandah to the wooden landing. My sister appears and takes her other arm and like a baby who's taking her first steps, we steer her along, ready in case she stumbles. My mother is all concentration and daring too on her way to the car. She straightens up while I hold the passenger door open then shifts her hips and turns herself around so she can slowly, carefully lower her body into the car. I've put a pillow in to prop her up in the seat Now it's her ankles and feet dangling underneath the door and I lift them one by one and feel no resistance as I settle them on the floor.

She slides her hand along the seat-belt sash to the buckle and feels for the clasp. By the time I've closed her door and gone around to my side she's pushed it in and felt the click.

I drive out along the gravel track towards the main road. The water, the water's beside us. The big old bay like a grey bowl filling and spilling. The rain's easing to a drizzle. She's interested in everything sliding by her window. A row of old cypress pines, the view they'd get from houses lining my side of the road, the return of a bit of sunshine. I lean my head towards her and try to pick up what she's saying but it's hard. Her voice so soft, the talk of the girls in the back seat running over her words.

We pass through St Leonards and head towards Ocean Grove. I look across at her sitting beside me. Remember this trip. Remember how mum took the morning in. Took it in with the sun and the light talk of her grand-daughters running through the car and paddocks and trees going by so fast on the open stretch between the roundabout and the straight road to the coast. Going so fast and going so slow..

the tree of woman..

2011-10-04T23:19:00.000+11:00

I wrote this a couple of years ago..
Mum can't read much anymore. She finds it hard to see a photo when you show her one and relies on the light being good, really good to pick up any detail at all. She's 91 and has macular degeneration. As she puts it "Oh well, everybody's got to get something"
Her acceptance is one of the loveliest things about her.

On Sunday and Wednesday nights she calls for a chat. Sunday is to wish me well for school and Wednesday to see how I went.

Last night when she rang I was asleep on the kitchen couch. My husband talked with her and told her about his week. A teacher had fallen off a chair and broken his pelvis (the chair had been placed on top of a table and he'd stood on it to get something off the ceiling....) Another teacher had a turn in class after a student fainted. The student was dissecting a sheep's heart. The teacher is 4 or 5 months pregnant.

So Mum had these stories to retell when I called later but she had one of her own to give me too. Mum relies on a regional service which supplies talking books.. She can't read the catalogue so the bag that brings her fortnightly tapes is mostly hit and miss.
Yesterday when she opened the package out slipped Patrick White's The Tree of Man.. For two hours she sat in sunshine in her lounge room and listened..
A marvellous story, she said.
Did you finish it? I ask
Oh no. There are lots of tapes to go.. I'll listen to more tomorrow.

I was 19 when I discovered Patrick White..

she gives me...

2011-09-02T09:23:00.000+10:00

I ring her at 3 on a Friday afternoon and ask if she'd like a visit. She can't hear what I'm saying at first so I say it louder. Still she's unsure but when I hold the receiver close to my lips and repeat the question, she gets it. And yes she'd like to see me! I gather up a few things. The blue book, photos of a friend's garden, a couple of cakes.

I wind down the driveway and park under the carport. I remember when her car used to be here. I let myself in and wait.
She's at the top of the landing, stick in one hand, plastic bag of bits and pieces in the other. I watch her coming sideways down the stairs, leaning against the wall, measuring each footstep, willing herself not to trip as she edges towards the slate floor.
The living room where we sit is warm. Two heaters taking the chill out of the air. We make tea in the kitchen and I carry in the wooden tray.
She takes the book, looks carefully at the cover and flips it to the first page. It's a secondhand hardback bought at a market stall in January. My future son-in-law has designed a wedding invitation in the form of a book cover illustrated with fine-line pictures that are fragments of five years of love...She peers through her glasses and studies the tiny pictures the way you might examine a china cup. Every detail in the design is noted and checked. She's impressed and tells me so.
The same goes for the photos. A Bristol garden in late spring. A fernery.
As we drink tea and nibble on chocolate she's taking everything I've brought today in, in, in.
She's drinking it in, thinking it in, leaving this room...
Later I come away with an easter egg, a jar of humbugs and a near-ripe persimmon.

nicholson gem..

2011-09-01T21:10:00.000+10:00

She slips on a bandaid dropped on the floor. It's 10.30 at night and she's about to turn off the laundry light when it happens. She falls heavily and my youngest sister and her husband who are staying overnight hear her.  A thud and a cry..   She's in a corner, her head touching a door, her body caught between the stove and a bench. It takes half an hour to help her sit up and then slowly, carefully they manage to walk her to bed.    In the morning they call an ambulance and off she goes to hospital.   an x-ray shows her hip is not broken but badly bruised. She's unable to walk.  All day she waits with my sister in emergency and at 10 in the evening is admitted to a ward that specializes in short-term stays.  The nurses tell my mother she will need to be transferred to the rehab unit but no space is available and though they try to place her in a general care ward, no bed is available there either so my mother stays where she is in a sunlit corner of a ward named Tambo (a wide east Gippsland river)
She is there in the midst of migraines and domestic accidents until late in the afternoon 9 days later when she is transferred to the rehab section.

******
Day 16
Nicholson GEM..
Her room faces a grass courtyard ..
the branches of the tree outside her window are covered in buds..

am here with mum. she's just closed her eyes for a sleep. it's 20 to 3. a mild winter's day.
what's in the room?
A sign at the door that says Wet Floor. Caution.   tiny droplets spread out like a watery map on the  vinyl .
Sheet of paper pinned on the noticeboard beside her bed. The physio program for the week. she's booked for 1 hour on Mon Tues Weds.
Drawing of an orange cat by Angela, 10 years old, Liz's daughter. The cat is standing on its hind feet holding its front paws out like open arms.  A small grey mouse, a dish and a scratching post are placed at the side. The cat is smiling.
Leaflet advertising the Latrobe Regional Hospital Sensory Walking Track 'For use by Rehab patients and friends of Nicholson Rehab and Macalister Wards'
(Nicholson and Macalister -like the Tambo -are the names of Gippsland Rivers, we passed over the bridges on the way to Lakes Entrance each year  )

On the bedside table
a jar of curly Barley Sugar.. my grandparents believed these lollies were good for you
jug of water, 2 plastic tumblers - one lidded with a drinking straw. Mum doesn't drink a lot of water she's never got into the habit of remembering to drink it.
her glasses and a small magnifier.. battery operated..
get well card of pink roses from her sister. even though Auntie Kath has printed in large capital letters Mum says she can't make out what she's written. I read it to her.
Menu for Thurs -2 days time. we filled it in before
2 biros
packet of textas
sketch book- Mum's drawn pictures of trees.. black wires spool across the pages like broken threads ..the branches..    green red and pink leaves are straddled in mid air like a bonnet of confetti
hardback book of photographs Australia's Remarkable Trees
small black radio.. i notice when we come in that it's staticky. mum fiddles with a dial and then puts it on the table. abc classic fm ..it's still fuzzy
little box of tissues torn open at the side
tube of Deep Heat Rub- for her hip
jar of lanolin- her feet
small make-up bag
jonquils in a vase on the window ledge
daphne in a vase on the bedside shelf

it's 10 to 3
We talk about Nana and Pupa.  Mum tells me some dates
Tom B. (her dad) born September 4 1884
Molly B. (her mum) born     June   1887

Dad (Pupa) was 16 at the turn of the century

Mum (Nana) was 13 at the turn of the century

they were married at St Alipius' Ballarat on August 4th 1915
Jack who became a priest  born July 6th 1916
Eileen (mum) born June 5th 1918
Kathleen born Feb 27th 1920
Jim born July 31st 1921

Mum (Nana) was very busy says Mum.

Pupa died at 89
Nana died at 89
Jack died when he was 71
Mum is 93
Kath is 91
Jim turns 90 on July 31st

20 to 4
Nurse comes to help mum to the bathroom
she holds on to the walker and tries to lift her feet.  mostly she shuffles

Outside in the corridor a buzzer goes off
the phone at the nurses' station is ringing
noone there to answer it

outside the window a tree is in bud. pink or white? think it's white. i ask the nurse what it is and when she comes back she says she's been told it's an ornamental apple

I can hear Mum whistling in the bathroom.

two weeks ago..

2011-09-01T19:20:00.000+10:00

september 1st 2011
spring in the blossom over the fence
a light blue sky at 5 in the afternoon
Leonard Cohen by my side

two weeks ago today
Tanya 36
a woman from the next street
walked over the railway tracks
into the path of a train
bound for the city
just on lunchtime
just like that
leaving
seven children
and a husband
to carry her broken hallelujah..

just found this.. i wrote it in 2009..

How do Iremember her? Some years ago she livedacross the road. A tall girl, stalky ifI had to describe the way she looked. Inoticed there were a lot of kids and they were younger than ours or seemed tobe. It was hard to know how many therewere. They were quiet, I remember that. Our kids would be out in the street kicking the footy or riding bikes orskateboards and the kids across the road hardly made any noise. The house had been rented out for as long aswe’d been living here and people had come and gone. In the early years Peter would go over with acouple of cakes as a welcome to whoever had just moved in.. I think he wouldhave gone over to say hello to them but I can’t be sure. So when I went over to say hello, they’d been there for a while and I’dhad time to observe her a little. I noticed she always walked to the shops andbrought the groceries home in plastic bags. She’d go up late in the afternoon. She looked more like a big sister going out to get a few things afterschool than a mother.

2011-08-18T22:14:00.000+10:00

earlier today I read a poem online
Things I Say To Myself While Hanging Out Laundry
(a woman hangs out sheets and meditates
on ants and Albert Einstein)

an hour later I went out with the clothes basket

no wind
shed door wide open
the soggy lawn

towels and sheets,
shirts and pjs
I'd just finished
3 men's hankies peg peg peg
3 grey dog tails limp in the air
when a bird started up
in the yard next door
over the fence in a leafless tree
tangle of branches
network of buds
three brown birds
cleaning beaks,
shucking off dust from feathers
and one making music
little chest throbbing
doubling and trebling
one bell, two bells
stroking the air

On a grey afternoon
the song of that bird
called up a memory
my mother stringing the line
with nappies and bunny-rugs,
jumpers and school socks,
and whistling while she pegged.

A nine year old sitting on the stone step
at the back door
and mum winding up the line
and filling the old blue basin
under the plum tree..

in the eyes of love..

2011-07-11T23:59:00.001+10:00

a month ago today my daughter Pip was married.. to an angel of a man..
how can I tell you how wonderful the wedding was?

for now- for one reason and another - this will have to do...

ISN'T SHE LOVELY?!
and thank you Chris..

sunday morning coming down..

2011-06-26T22:18:00.001+10:00

if at a time and date to come I have to give an account of self.. this is what I'll say for today.

I woke about 8 or was it 9? the bed was warm but I was alone so I rolled over and found the radio on the bedside table and wiggled my fingers down the side until the dial went on.. the news had just started.. I heard that a suicide bomber had caused 30 people to die in a maternity hospital ward somewhere in Afghanistan.. just like that.. on a Sunday morning in a bedroom in Victoria, Australia I lay listening to the pictures inside those words ... mothers and babies and nurses and doctors and cleaners and probably fathers and sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles and grandparents... were now, right now all blown up and dead in a broken down room in a broken down country a long way from heaven and closer to hell than anyone on earth could possibly imagine..

the rest of the day is history..

standin' in the sun darlin'....

2011-06-24T22:52:00.002+10:00

I play Astral Weeks all day long and think of her. I send out a link to the video her brother has taken, complete with the music from the wedding ceremony and find myself watching it over and over.. each time I send it out to a sister or a niece, I press the white arrow at the side and let the images roll once more. She's radiant!! texts my niece and I look at that word and see her face lit by happiness and spilling out like sunlight all across the room...

Does it matter what I write? For a week now I've been in a state of still, quiet happiness.. from the weeks leading up to Saturday June 11th to the days that followed all I could do -still do!- was think about the two of them and picture it all and think about how lucky she is he is and we are to be part of this great love..

I'll write about being her mother and being part of this time in her life.. walking with her along Sydney Road looking for the dress.. seeing her in it on that very first day.. the little shopgirl Clara with the stud just above her lip..dreamy Clara who brought in a georgette piece to slip over Pip's shoulder when she thought she couldn't wear a strapless dress.. how she came round over time..how I saw something gleaming in Clara's eyes when Pip stood on the dais and looked at herself dressed as a bride..then Pip smiled at me... how that was the moment .. that was it .. the shining moment...

#

how do you feel?

2011-06-24T18:54:00.000+10:00

I went to the gallery at the top of our old street with my Mum a couple of weeks back.. just before the wedding. .. Once the Morwell Town hall- for a period it doubled as the town library - it is now owned by  Arts Victoria who run it as the Latrobe Regional Gallery .. Funny how the room where I used to wander around wooden shelves looking for Enid Blyton books is now the place I go to with my 93 year old Mum.

The gallery's one of her favourite spots.

We have a coffee in the cafe and just as we're leaving, the woman in charge points us in the direction of the room opposite.. You might like that she says.. In we go, Mum holding onto my arm and me conscious of how unsteady she is on her feet.. I notice how thin her ankles are .. Just inside the door an installation's been set up.. There are tiny post-it style notes covering much of a sidewall that's designed as a work-in-progress..  How do you feel? is the title the artist has given the project... We're encouraged to pick a rubber stamp, press it on an ink pad, print it on a white note and then write about how we feel ..Mum's sight is poor but she manages to sign her name in the corner and while i'm stamping my slip I can see she's also written something in the tiny space above the butterfly stamp

                                   fine

I pin our notes on the wall - making sure hers is above the rest and wrap her arm inside mine. We go on our way.

2011-06-05T00:26:00.001+10:00

you will come back (you know you will!)
life ebbs and flows
you float
you swim
you find your feet
again..

night thoughts..

2011-05-01T22:58:00.059+10:00

Life gets better
Never give up
Green is the best colour in the world
Blue comes second
Be kind
Learn as much as you can about everything
People teach you in the way that they live
You can always say sorry
Keep going
Life is a daily prayer
A mother's love is so important all through your life
Things happen
Listening is a gift
Love is a lot of things
When you're calm you're in control
Good friends never leave you
The tide comes in and the tide goes out
Little children are precious companions
You are stronger than you think
A cold apple tastes delicious
A cow's udder is a lovely place to tuck your head into
Irish music is the sound of green
Thoughts come and go
Fear passes through you if you keep calm
Love gives you energy
Lovely is one of my favourite words
God is everywhere
Skin on skin is the most comforting way to go to sleep
Grief is never really over
Curious things happen that connect this world to the next
I will always remember my sister
Writing is a way through
Balance is so important
Jesus was a God-send
Reading takes you everywhere
Daisies are divine
Love-making is lovely
Touch is wonderful
Smiling is a gift
Humour is very good for you
A Jack Russell is a marvellous breed of dog
I like the sound of a train at night
Mary Mckillop was a strong woman
Hope springs eternal is one of my favourite mottoes
You can never have enough love
Old friends are your treasures
My dad loved me and I'm glad he told me when I was young
I could be a lot better at a lot of things
Every day is a miracle
Life is a lot of mystery
Things work out
Hearts are always trumps!

red tee..

2011-03-31T17:21:00.007+11:00

Late last year we took Long Service Leave and had six weeks on the road. England, France. I was keen for Ireland but my husband thought differently. "Too many narrow roads, not enough live music in the pubs" we were there in 2007and this is how he remembers it. I've written elsewhere about the 2010 trip and this is a nothing piece but earlier today a woman in a shop told me she liked the red tee-shirt I was wearing. ( I bought it in an alleyway in Amboise, a riverside town south of Paris.) Another woman standing nearby looked up and said "I bet you don't know what it says."
I came home and found a French-English translation website. I'm walking around with this across my chest.

A style, Mado, some, the Others, Instructions:

It was once Mado, a style, a history of some for the Others. A thought, clothes, words for a history of mode... For some, style is Mado, for the Others Mado a style is.. Life taste of some, style of Others... Fashion passes, style Mado stays... Mado is a way of life for some and instructions for the Others. Style is the clothes of thought. For some rest white for the Others it is black!!

Code Mado: Get dressed in the cloakroom of the one and carry it as the Other one. Mado, one day, clothes form a colour, a style... Mado conjures in all time all persons, all styles.. The back it is the place, the place it is the back and vice versa...

Yes, well..

gift..

2011-03-29T23:16:00.002+11:00

She gives me two bars of Fry's Chocolate Cream and a packet of unsalted cashews. I bring her a bowl of pumpkin soup and a pink rose. In the last couple of years we've become good friends.
I'll miss her company when she's no longer living at home.
I use her full name to say goodbye. She looks across the table and smiles. We get into a discusssion about names, particularly voguish ones that some children have nowadays then I run down the ladder of my own brothers and sisters.. Desmond, Michele, Paul, Michael, Joan, Patrick, Elizabeth and Gabriel.
She listens with all her might.
"You couldn't do better than that" she says. "You couldn't do better than that.."

She's that kind of friend.

actress of a childhood..

2011-03-24T23:52:00.000+11:00

Liz Taylor died overnight. I heard the headlines on the news when I woke this morning.. she was 79.. the first memory that came was the image of her as a young girl with a pale face and blue-black hair riding a horse by the sea in National Velvet .. when we were kids during the school holidays we watched movies that featured her and Mickey Rooney. my brother Paul used to remind me of Mickey.. he had bold ideas about what we could do..
when I looked at the Guardian online today the link to the old film was there.. here it is..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2011/mar/23/elizabeth-taylor-career-in-clips?intcmp=122

After the tsunami comes the grief .. guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 March 2011 22.11 GMT

2011-03-15T21:57:00.003+11:00

The reporter from the Guardian is walking along a muddy road surrounded by debris .. He's in the coastal town of Shintona in the prefecture of Miyagi, an area devastated by the earthquake and tsunami last Friday.. Those two words flotsam and jetsam are never more real than when I look at the screen.. A stretch of railway track has been lifted up and plonked sideways by the road and looks like a picket fence.. The reporter stands near the track then reaches into the rubble and picks up something he's found.. A dinner plate ringed in mud.. He turns it in his hands while the camera zooms in on a decorative blue and white plate.. Around the edges are the words Tonight is the Star Festival

A blue body bag lies not far away, tied at the top with thin blue cord..

Tonight is the star festival
Tonight is the star festival

That line sits with me all day long.. Around 9 I'm standing out the back with the dog, rubbing his head ..There are crickets in the grass and a light, cool breeze and tonight can I tell you the sky above is starless?

Pat..

2011-02-18T14:33:00.007+11:00

My sister Liz’s 50th birthday. We sit outside in her back yard and eat the roast lamb dinner my brother Pat has prepared. Pat's down from Queensland for a week to help celebrate with the rest of us here in Victoria. My youngest brother doesn’t say much but he insists I sit next to Liz while he takes a place on the other side of the table, squeezing up amongst the kids and though he's hungry, I notice he serves himself last of all.

For about 15 years he works for a doctor and her husband on a property they own on the outskirts of Bundaberg. Pat's a carpenter and does maintenance work on their house and land, renovates bathrooms and kitchens, builds sheds and puts new fences around the paddocks. Over time he builds a boat for the couple which they go sailing in, all around the top end from Airlie Beach to Darwin. Pat tells me that while most builders have other tradesmen working alongside them on a site, he learns to study the clouds for company. He watches the way they form and discovers what each one means as he goes about his work. Clouds give you feelings of peace he says.

My sisters are also there for the birthday and it's relaxing just sitting outside together. Liz tells stories of the people she comes across in her work with the Salvation Army. One woman she sees each week hasn't got any friends or family and so never has visitors. "I haven't got any infrastructure" is how she puts it. When we start the meal, Liz looks as if she's about to cry. We're just so lucky she says.

As the night goes on, the sky grows dark and then lights up with flashes of storm activity coming from the north of the city. The kids are racing around the yard on roller blades, the dog- a docile springer spaniel wanders in amongst the candles placed around the paved area in a bid to deter the mossies and finds space under the table nudging at our legs. Behind us a great fat spider is spinning a web underneath a girder connecting the old stables. The kids bring out a torch from a science kit and take turns shining a spindly light on the old web-master fastening thread to thread in the warm air. Music rolls out through the back door of the house while we sit talking then the far-off rumbling of thunder begins to get louder and we think about going inside. Pat points to the sky and says the storm will pass us by. He can see blue above the fence next door. I look over and all I see is darkness then gradually this gives way to a paler colour, an inky blue that sits above the chook shed like a brushswirl on a child's painting.

Feel the breeze he says. The wind has shifted. It's cooling right down.

.

wedding dress..

2011-01-21T19:42:00.025+11:00

On the desk beside me is a photograph of my mother in her wedding dress
She's dated it on the back Sep 20 1941

I saw the dress for the first time on Tuesday this week.
It is now Friday.
My mother's dress is made of figured satin.
-I had to ring her to check because I wasn't sure if she was saying finger satin or figure satin
after she said it a few more times on the phone, I got it- figured satin
The dress is kept in a plastic bag on a linen shelf at my mother's unit
It lies underneath sheets and pillowcases
I had no idea she'd kept it
I have no memory of ever seeing it

I carried it into the lounge room and opened the bag onto my knees.
It is the colour of cream
It is covered in lightly embossed flowers
Satin feels slippery on your skin
The sleeves are long with little puffs at the shoulders and two hand stitched press studs at each wrist
The bodice is high necked with a soft v in the middle
My mother wore a strand of pearls on the day she was married
There is a line of ruching gathered under the bust
Covered buttons with rouleau loops go all the way down the back
My mother's sister did up the bottom ones and she fastened the top
It is floor length with a ripply circular train
The dress has yellowy spots on one shoulder and a few marks on the skirt
There are no holes or tears in the dress.

I held the dress up to the light and saw my mother on the other side of the table looking at it
My mother is 92
When she was 23 she wore this dress
She had dark hair with a slight wave and wore a veil that reached the floor
My mother wore silver shoes with a small heel
My mother was 5 foot 7 when she was young

I have the photo beside me, taken on the morning of her wedding
She is standing by the window in a studio in Clifton Hill,
Her dark curly hair is just touching her shoulders
Her face is clear and her eyes are smiling
She is carrying a long bouquet of roses and gardenias
On her arm she is dangling a ribboned horseshoe
The train is spread out like a wave on the floor in front of her
She looks like an Irish princess
My mother loved marrying my father..

just looking..

2011-01-16T00:45:00.002+11:00

At the op shop this morning I stood beside a man holding a bundle of books.. Old hardbacks.. The one on top caught my eye because when I glanced down I saw it was titled something like Learning Swedish. He was middle aged, dark haired and had a moustache as fine as a cat's whiskers. In the seconds that went by I began to picture him opening the book in a room with his Swedish girlfriend but when I looked down again, I saw it wasn't a language manual but a book about Crafting Softwood. The woman serving flicked through the pile and stacked them by the register.
The large white book at the bottom was an embossed Holy Bible.
"That'll be 4 dollars" she said and he paid her, dropped them in plastic bag and went out the door..

brushstrokes..

2010-11-26T00:18:00.008+11:00

It’s late here..I'm tired from the drive down to Morwell today but want to put down something before I go to bed. Something about mum and being with her on a wet November afternoon. She’d been out at an activities day organised by the health services at her local council.. She looked tired but better than she's been for some months.. We had a look at the garden.. I swept the path that was covered in rain-soaked pink fuchsia buds and made tea for the two of us.. An omelette which she seemed to enjoy. We watched the news as we ate and saw a boy from Morwell take a hat-trick at the Gabba.. I still don't know how much she actually sees.. Before I left to go home, as we stood together in the kitchen she picked up a brush and did my hair. . It’d been raining through the afternoon and the back of my head had gotten wet. . as she pushed the bristles through, so lightly that the ends flicked up around the sides of my ears, I remembered how she dried and combed my hair when i was young, how safe i felt tucked into her chest, how calm and strong her hands were and as I stood there at the bench trying with all my might to stay in the moment stay in the real and now with her at 92 and me touching 60, stay in this holy moment and hear her telling me I have good hair and I feel so loved, so young..

Wayne..

2010-11-21T21:03:00.004+11:00

Wayne died on Thursday. He lived on his own across the road at 17. I thought something was up when I went outside about 6 and saw a group of people standing in the front yard of his house. Some were on mobiles, a few were smoking. His sister appeared from the back and went up to the house but no one followed her in. I tossed out the tealeaves, broke off a few spent geranium flowers and went inside.

Wayne barracked for Collingwood and during the season the front window of the house featured a Weg Magpie poster. Grand final day started early over there. Even when his side wasn’t playing he still flew the flag. The side gate would swing open around 9 and all morning his mates would be up and down that drive carrying in the supplies.

He liked a drink and was quite overweight. His parties were legendary. He held them for just about anything. Mostly they were loud. In the early days of living on his own they didn’t finish too well. Around 2 or 3 am when the music would have begun to tone down, there’d be an argument or a bit of shouting and on a couple of occasions I remember women screaming to stop what must have been a fight. It wasn’t Wayne’s fault though. His friends were the wild ones. A few times I went over in the morning to complain about the fact that we’d hardly slept and he’d look down at the ground and shake his head as if he couldn’t believe it either.

I liked his parents. They were an old-fashioned couple who’d lived in the area all their lives. Sonny retired from working at the Heinz factory in Dandenong not long after we moved here and I remember seeing him going off in a mate’s car each week in a white shirt and black trousers carrying a piano accordion on his lap. He played in the local senior citizen’s band. Rhoda pottered about in the garden looking after a few roses. On Sunday afternoons she’d be in an apron standing at the top of the steps waving her children and grandchildren goodbye.

They died within a year of each other and because Wayne was the only one of their kids who wasn’t married, he just stayed on. He wasn’t too flash with looking after the place. When the canvas awnings began to tear and then fray into strips that fluttered in the breeze, Wayne didn’t bother replacing them or even pull up the inside blinds. The house took the full strength of the afternoon sun and that was that. It was enough for him to mow the lawns and put out the bins on a Sunday evening. His mates would sit on the front steps smoking and having a beer. I don’t know what sort of a job he had. For some years he drove a yellow mini minor with a bumper sticker that said Don’t look too closely, your daughter might be inside.

I never saw him with a girl.

His nickname was Bluey, he was a committeeman with the local cricket club and the scorer for many years. I doubt if he ever missed a game.

Beyond a smile and wave when we were out the front at the same time, I only had a few conversations with him. One night I was home alone during an earth tremor and met him on the road when I went outside to see what had happened. He didn’t have a lot to say. We both laughed and said we’d meet again if the house fell down.

On Thursday night I went to my brother’s for his birthday and when I arrived home a fellow was standing on the porch. He told my husband and me that his cousin Wayne had suffered a heart attack in the afternoon. Apparently he’d been unwell for a couple of weeks but hadn’t mentioned it to anyone. An ambulance crew called and took him to hospital but he died soon afterwards. By 4.30 his mates at the pub knew.

He was 48.

Tonight it’s Saturday night and not one light’s on at no 17. I look across the road and just see an empty house.

song of a late afternoon..

2010-08-12T18:44:00.008+10:00

not much comes..
but here, just now as I stop to put the laptop away
and get ready to make the tea,
I hear birds..
I hear birdsong that's different to birds' voices at any other time of the year,
late winter, southern hemisphere, Berwick.
Outside my kitchen window
birds are finishing up for the day,
Closing their shops,
sweeping the floors,
putting away the bits and pieces of their work for the afternoon.
They're about to go home.

Before they go, they sing their music.
Squirt the notes into the cold air like this...

                                 s s s s s s s s s and wwwwwwwww and t t t t t t t t ...

                                     up and down, side to side, over and under,
                                                  over and over they sing


They sing their song in through the window, over a sink
and all around this room where I sit
listening and waiting ...
finding my words at last.

boot..

2010-07-17T17:59:00.007+10:00

On the way to my mum's yesterday, driving along the Princes Freeway not too far out of Pakenham, I saw a boot lying beside the road.. A brown Blundstone, in very good nick.. What caught my eye was this.. The boot didn't look as if it had accidentally dropped off the back of a truck, nor did it look as if it had been there for long. No. That boot was a freshly laid egg. It had a purpose about it and I recognized it straight away. That boot was the first art of the trip.

It looked as if it was about to begin a life of its own.. There was some power in the way it lay.. Instead of going off on the exit to Nar Nar Goon, it was coming on.. Heading into traffic..Kicking against the flow.. On a 45 degree angle and in the centre of the bitumen it stood there catching the light on its leather skin.. A bit like the way a man might stand - his back to the sun, drawing strength from the big yellow ball as he waited alone on a road.

I turned the radio down, right down as though that brown boot had slipped through the back window while I was driving by and now was on the seat beside me. I had company for a while. The boot was with me.. I'd picked up a hitch-hiker.

I had to ask-

who are you?

how long were you waiting?

what's yr story?

I drove along smiling. I had a picture. I had a story. I wondered who'd been wearing the boot before i'd met it..

a builder or plumber- who couldn't face going to work?

a youth who missed his mum,

or his girlfriend

or his mates?

a boy who wished so badly he was back at school kicking the footy at recess

or talking to a girl in the corridor?

The boot had what's known as attitude but not something you'd take offence at, not that selfish, boorish stuff that passes for being cool. No. That boot had such a strong individual sense of itself that I wanted to put it on, hold my foot down on the pedal and for just a few kms try out some other life..

.a man's life at half past 11 on a bright winter morning..

a little black book..

2010-06-25T18:26:00.004+10:00

.

The book fits in my hand like a slim paperback. Its black cardboard cover creased in a web of lines like old skin. On the inside cover written in a firm even script is his first entry
                                Geelong Police
                                1926 Phone Number

Just below this is a faded lemon 1 penny stamp and midway down the page is an inscription in my mother's own handwriting .

                Thomas Joseph Bowden a police man from 1915 until 1939.

The first page is in pencil and though the lead has faded I can make out the names of Alfred Edward Bush from Rupanyup and James Ross from Greens Creek who must produce their licences to Police within seven days.
My grandfather keeps a record of Seized Goods from around this time beginning with J R Hutchings on 28/12/28
         1 Buick Car
         1 Heater
         6 Draught Horses

I turn the pages and find longer lists of property items that tell stories of their own:

One race horse (known as Cashil)
one Bay horse 1 Black Pony
one Chestnut one Grey
Two Draughts one Dray
Three Cows one Single Furrow Plough
40 Head Cattle one Harrows
one Writing Desk
one Lounge suite one Table
1 Carpet Square 1 Gramaphone
1 Apollo Phone
one Book Case one D.R. Table
1 Side Board 1 Tea Waggon
one Carpet square 1 Wash Stand
1 Dressing Table one carpet
1 oak Wardrobe one dressing table
one Carpet
T Lindsay seized 4/9/29

Good seized at Grassmede on 24/7/29
1 Case of Gordon's Gin 1 Doz
1 Case of Black and White Whisky 2 1/4 Doz
4 Bots of Robinsons Yellow Label whisky
1 Case of Fosters Lager 4 Doz.
2 Cases of S..... Wine 8 Doz
2 Cases of Lawries Whisky 2 Doz
1 Case Snowy        4 Doz
2 Boxes Capstan Cigarettes 100 pkts
1 Box County Life Cigarettes
1 1/2 Doz Flasks Brandy Le Beaumont
210 ozs Doz Flasks Johnnie Walker
8 12 Doz Moonbeam Cocktail
7 Chairs 1 Piano 2 couches
1 Table 1 Wireless set 7 chairs
3 Tables 1 Over Mirror
Carpets   Cocoanut Matting
1 Piano   one Specimen Case
3 Lounge Chairs     5 Chairs
one mirror    one clock
1 Walnut Bed Suit 20 Carpet Squares
1 Wardrobe    5 Chairs
2 Tables    1 Side board
              1 Dressing Table
Mr Thomas Lindsay
Woolsthorpe
Seized in connection with County Court Warrant
on 24.7.29
    One Hudson car
No. 747444
======================

Will fix it as soon as
possible possibly on
Saturday
=====================

One report is only 4 lines long

Ian Sharpley
13 years of age on October last
driving Car up Selby St Stawell
on 15.1.29 at 12.20 pm

I hope to put more of my grandfather's notes on this blog.

june 22nd..

2010-06-22T22:22:00.002+10:00

I'm just about to finish the day at school and all I want to say is I've thought of my sister a lot throughout this the 22nd June, her special day.

I loved her sense of fun.

I loved her ability to see things plainly and simply "you know what you know" would so often be the words I'd take away after we'd hung up the phone..

She had the gift of being able to praise you when you needed it .

She had so much good in her-

A great spark in her being

Happy Birthday Michele wherever you are on this day

Loveyou...

on the page again..

2010-06-17T16:33:00.002+10:00

so here I am at the desk.. back at the tree to be precise. the apple tree beyond the sunroom window... for company today I have two blackbirds -male and female- hopping on a couple of branches that are higher than the ceiling of this room.. now they're resting in the leaves.. above the greenery a nest of blue sky..

******

I've been reading a series called My Hero in The Guardian.. Nick Clegg, the leader of the New Democrats considers Samuel Beckett his hero. Why? He admires the fact that the Irish author asked dangerous questions... Doing so came naturally to him..It was just his particular way of thinking I suppose..  Anyway like many others, I regard this as a refreshing insight into the mind of a politician..

Thinking about Clegg's choice prompted me to look back and see which heroes others had nominated.

Gordon Brown whom one of his party's candidates recently called " the worst Labor Prime Minister the country's ever had" was more predictable in his choice. Nelson Mandela. According to Brown, Mandela is a man "whose generosity of spirit and capacity for forgiveness make him a true hero for our times."

Aside from those politicians,  I was actually more interested in the selections Irish writers Colm Toibin and John Banville had made.

Jack Yeats, the painter and younger brother of the famous WB was Toibin's choice. Apparently the artist spent much of his life trying to understand and capture in his work  the light of the Irish landscape. The  play of light that he saw in the sky, in city streets and as it fell on the faces of people going about their daily lives. This is what most fascinated him. Painting with the right kind of light was the thing he tried to do - over and over and over. Toibin says that Yeats left no record of himself other than his paintings and "it seems there is no evidence he ever in his life discussed anything that was of great private concern to him"
Could this be really true?

Banville writes about a labrador named Ben.   Not a word is wasted.  I take the liberty of quoting the final paragraphs of his piece.

Though Ben was a handsome fellow he was not overly bright, as is the way with labradors. He could be annoying, was often smelly, insisted on what he considered to be his rights – good grub and plenty of it and two walks a day – and could lick himself with noisy relish in places the equivalent of which in a human being are not even visible to the person's unaided eye. Yet he cared for us, kept us exercised, tolerated our children and even, when the occasion required, guarded them; and, a gift above all gifts, he made us laugh.

Nietzsche writes: "I fear animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal." Ben, I am certain, recognised our terrible, human, predicament and tried to help us as best he could along our hard road. We were, however, a constant mystery to him, and it was in his brave, unwearying, dogged efforts to understand us that his heroism lay. Good dog, Ben.

old friends..

2010-04-30T13:05:00.010+10:00

I come home with a speculaas in my hand. The small, flat Dutch biscuit that tastes of cinnamon and sugar. I put it on the table. I cannot eat when I’m sitting there with the two of them. Feels like the end of something good. She’s so dependent on him.

Thin. Hair's cut short. Like a young boy who’s been clipped by his dad. Hollow cheekbones. Can’t focus. Bony. Maroon cardigan. Pale blue blouse. Tan woollen skirt. Short socks. Slippers.
I hold her hand and stroke her arm. Skin is warm and shiny. Like old satin. Now and then she takes her hand away and fiddles with her hanky. Rubs it across her mouth and then feels for the pocket in her cardigan to put it back into. Takes her a few goes before she finds the hole.
Her English is going. I speak louder than normal. As clearly as I can. Tell her about the kids and hope there’ll be something familiar in what I say that she can hold on to and remember.

I wrote that note to myself a year ago. At the time Nan and Bob were living across the road and most weeks I saw them. Either walking past on their daily circuit of the block or on my days off when I'd pop over for a coffee in the afternoon. Nan had been gradually losing her sight - macular degeneration- and her confidence. Bob did everything. In a matter of weeks he had to learn to shop, cook and clean the house. Then as time went on, she needed more care and Bob took over the task of washing and bathing her. He shrugged when I told him it was hard on him. "No matter" he said. "She's been good to me. Now it's my turn."

But after a few months like this it became too difficult to manage so they left their house and moved into their daughter's unit in the next street. A temporary thing. Ellen put up a few of their pictures and brought around some furniture. The coffee table with the fretwork legs that looked like tiny musical clefs, made by Bob when he was a young man, was now in a small sunroom. Up in the corner above the main window was the heavy wooden wall hanging that looked like the front of a pedlar’s cart. Bob had told me it once belonged to his parents and that he and Nan brought it out on the ship with them when they migrated to Australia in 1952.

The flat was crowded and the kitchen where Ellen and her husband might be talking was only a few feet away from the room where we sat. . When I went to see Nan and Bob I felt more like guest than a friend. Much as I wanted to keep up the connection, going to the unit wasn't the same as being able to just pop across the street. Gradually the frequency of the visits dropped away.
Last week, after a long break I called to see them.. Ellen and her husband were about to go out and Nan and Bob were sitting in the sunroom. Nan in a long white skirt and blue blouse (a peasant woman from an old painting) and Bob in his trademark flannel shirt and light trousers(he's a man who's used to being busy). Before they left Ellen took her mother for a walk around the room, a slow shuffling exercise holding onto her arms. "Don't lift her up while we're out Dad. It's not good for your back" Nan was shaky when Ellen lowered her into the chair. Her blindness is almost total. She's put on weight, looks puffy now. Bob didn't move while this was going on.
I thought of those lovely afternoons when we'd sit together and chat. Nan would make coffee and put out the speculaas. She had a way of saying his name with an upward note in her voice that sounded girlish and happy, as though no matter how many years they'd been together, she was still so proud of her catch.

"Bor-b.." she'd say and he'd pull out the table for her to put down the cups and saucers and just go on talking. He was interested in language. There were Dutch and English dictionaries on the bookshelf and when words came up that we were unsure of, he'd take those books down and we'd look things up and try to find a common thread. Dutch vowels were "so simple" he told me and I'd repeat words after him to prove it. One day, not long after I first visited them, I said that I felt at home in their house. It was more than feeling comfortable though, it just seemed as if there was a particular spirit in the room itself that made our time together so enjoyable. Bob nodded and told me there was a Dutch word for this feeling kuzzella. He wondered if I knew of an equivalent in English but I couldn't come up with one so we settled on the Dutch to describe the secret of the afternoon. After this, so many visits would end with that word. Kuzzella. Thanks for the kuzzella I'd say.

One morning they had a clean-out and in the afternoon when I answered the door they were standing there with a small print of Amsterdam that had come from the mantelpiece in their lounge room. In the corner of the picture was a dark brick building and at the entrance way a woman was bent on her knees scrubbing the flagstones. .In a cobbled lane beside the building another woman leaned over a wash trough. In the early years of their marriage, I knew Bob and Nan had actually lived down that lane. "We thought you'd like this. You know all about it.” I made room for it on my mantelpiece. Later when they'd left I looked to see if there was a hook on the back. Instead I found a slip of paper pasted onto the board. Het Straatje. Johannes Vermeer Van Delft. (The Little Street) I felt so honoured.

Last week, when I visited them, Nan didn't know me. I kissed her on the cheek but I could have been anyone. Her eyes were frightened and she spoke in Dutch to Bob. "She's saying she doesn't remember you. It's okay; she's not sure about anything anymore."

So Bob and I just chatted. He'd had a recent trip to hospital, a little trouble with his heart and he told me he had to take things easy. That explained why he'd hardly moved from his sunroom chair.

Then when it was time for them to have lunch, we said goodbye. Bob followed me to the door. As we were saying goodbye he held my hand tightly in his. I kissed him on the cheek and he told me he'd never forget me. When I reached the footpath I looked back and saw that he'd stepped out from the warmth of the room and was standing on the porch waving me off. The little spark was still there. It was only when I got home that I realized I'd forgotten to thank him for the kuzzella.

snippet from the past..

2010-03-05T17:24:00.003+11:00

One week in and I’m as young as them. Drive, walk, eat, talk, laugh, sleep. Easy living. Nothing better. We plot our way around the country like gypsies. Today we’re off to Glenveagh because the man behind the counter of an internet café in Westport has told us we shouldn’t miss it.. The landscape slips by like a spool of film across the glass. There are cardboard signs for Wexford strawberries and New Potatoes then a painted board outside a library reminding me that CHRIST DIED 4 THE UNHOLY. . It’s Sunday and no point asking the boys if they’re interested in going to mass. I’m not either. Our rental car is the best little church in the world. Peaceful and warm..

reasons..

2010-02-26T15:10:00.004+11:00

Reasons why I haven't written..
Because of Jack's will we have money to fix up the kitchen.. After 30 years of watching the pennies and five kids moving through the house there's a lot to do..

During August/September tradesmen ring the bell at 7 am most week day mornings. Probably not every day but the fact that one could come means things are out of sync. It feels like we're living in a share house and I start putting on a dressing gown as soon as I get out of bed.. .Some are here for hours pulling out pipes or slapping on plaster and overall they're loud and funny to listen to... The plasterer gets so angry, so angry with the ceiling... He talks to it as though it could answer him back .... And then there are the silent ones, the apprentices who hardly say a word..Awkward and sleepy looking,. I wonder how long it is since they were at school with their mates, kicking a footy at recess, each day taking care of itself.....All past tense now as they take orders from a boss.. Builder, electrician, plumber, cabinet maker, plasterer, floor sander and the last on board is the painter who turns out to be the father of one of the children I teach. .They arrive in overalls and boots and take up their tools and do the job .. Only one is grouchy and I can't work out why until I comment to the air-con fellow who's noticed it too and thinks if might be because he's expected to do something he hasn't allowed time for.. On the way to the car we cross paths and I tell him I'm sorry if he didn't know about the job. and he says he'll try to fit it in ... The following day late in the afternoon he's back on the doorstep. I do not recognize him such is the change in his face.. He's dropped by to put in a dimmer switch and even has time to advise on another part of the job.. I'm amazed at the change in his manner. .. .I tell him he looks so different and say it might be his cap but we both know it's not..

Ad because they're here there's no pattern about the day. I feel like I'm on duty with them. I find myself distracted from whatever it is I'm doing, just watching them work.
This is my nest after all.

After they've gone, all gone, I discover the pleasure of painting.. walls and ceiling, architraves, skirting boards, dado, doors
One wall takes 3 days to get right. I hang up a still life by Margaret Olley when it's finished.

Perfect match with the gum green background...

the watcher..

2010-02-19T11:54:00.003+11:00

little Paddy
old friend
lying in the sun
waiting on a word..

out there..

2010-02-14T22:42:00.010+11:00

Yesterday I took a few pictures of the view from the sunroom window. It's the room where I write. In previous lives, angled-off by a folding door, it's been a play-room, study and when we were really pushed for space we squeezed in a mattress and base and it became a bedroom for a small boy-Michael first and some years later, Dan..

I like working here. I love the way light sifts through the apple tree.. a kind of lime and yellow light For the past year or so because of a laptop i've had to have for school, I've gravitated to other places - the kitchen table, the study (also once a bedroom) and on warm afternoons on a table out the back. .... lately, however, the laptop's been playing up and in the last few weeks I"ve begun life anew on the computer here in the sunroom.. This desk is the place where I started taking writing seriously. The place where I began to think I could put things down a little more permanently than in exercise books and on bits of paper I carried in my bag.
Anyway after that little preamble I want to show you a photo I took yesterday..

look hard.. a fabulous lorikeet has just dropped by..

bird and bell..

2010-01-22T17:33:00.023+11:00

how it is..

yesterday i had a mini meltdown.. an American term i know but the way i felt and the way i might have looked to you if you'd seen me, would make you think the description was pretty well on the mark..
i'd spent most of the day in the classroom at school, setting it up again for the year.. most starts-of-the-year i'm like this but yesterday it was a stronger upheaval than usual.. i do not want to go back to work.. i think i've probably just had enough.. being at home seems like the best way to live.. it's not that it's easy.. more that life lived at home taking the days as they come has become my reality of peace, being here in the day gives me time to make sense of the world outside this one..

am i a writer? i try to be.. i do what i can with what i have.. i like my own company and i like the company of words.. i'd like to say i play with words but i don't really think this is the case.. i'm more of an amateur in that area.. still making connections with them.. still pulling them out of the sea inside my head, still trying to work out which ones to keep and which to toss back..

and, saying all this, under the green umbrella of a cherry-plum tree in the back yard, can i tell you that i've not long finished reading My Father's Suitcase? ..Orhan Pamuk's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. .. my friend Vilma gave me a photocopy of it when i saw her last night.

it starts : Two years before his death, my father gave me a small suitcase filled with his writings, manuscripts, and notebooks...

i am sitting in a backyard in Berwick, Australia January 2010 reading the words of a man in Istanbul, Turkey speaking to an audience in Oslo in December 2006 and i feel his presence with me as though he was sitting on the other side of the table..a green, wooden bird-spattered table tucked inside a shaded space, bamboo chime clunking in the breeze behind us..

just after i finished reading his essay, i had one of those moments where every moving, sounding, seeable thing seizes on your attention and gets it.. one by one i go through what i see hear, feel, smell can touch, can't touch, have met before, haven't seen ever.. an all-of- a-sudden rises up and i'm aware of the life of a thing in the big world of everything.. the dog lying on his back in the stick-up grass rubbing back and forth on an itchy spot, the heat-burnt purple bottle-brushes of a shrub near the fence that would flake into black crumbs in my fingers if i touched them, two pieces of pottery nailed to the palings, one a circle of chubby angels, the other a terracotta square with a central flower ..and while i'm thinking what the flower is,

a rush of wind blows over the yard and throws me off course and i hold onto the papers and listen to leaves and shut my eyes and hear a breath in my head ..the breath of my sister.. Michele used to catch her breath when she was sleeping a little k.kaw i could hear lying on the top bunk beside her single iron bed that had belonged to the nuns, her bed against the window on the other side of our room. my sister who died and now lives in my head, in birdsong, in birdflight, in the windchime i bought at a nursery in Warrandyte in December..Three tin birds connected by a beaded leather cord and on the end of the cord a funnel shaped bell that rings now in the wind like a school bell did in the 50s in Morwell where we all went to school. all nine of us.. here we are again, here we run around the playground ringed by pines, the long block of playground and us running all over the place and yelling to each other free and noone looking at us and all on our own here in the yard of my mind.

in a garden wet with rain..

2009-11-21T23:43:00.015+11:00

she comes for lunch.. she comes with her husband on the train.. just before it reaches the station she calls.. I press the receiver hard against my ear to hear a jumble of train clatter/broken whistling/the phone fading and coming back and in all that her voice is there so polished and fine -so English- Where do we go? her directional skills are wobbly so I stand in the kitchen and put myself in her shoes stepping onto the platform.. tell her to look back from where they've come and go right.. right and I hope that's enough.
it is.. my husband picks them up and brings them home and we lean into each other on the doorstep like late blooming roses.. friends from 18 to 58.. years of sunshine and rain..

asparagus from kooweerup / rocket / ham/ tomatoes / crumbly cheese / cracked pepper / mayonnaise /balsamic vinegar/ multigrain/ whitebread
vino/ beer(cuba59) water/ juice/ tea
strawberries/ kiwifruit/ bananas/
hazelnut wafers
tea in a pot

good talk/family photos/stories
we watch 2 films Dan's made
i take them for a drive to the gravel-edged road over the hill and not far from town where the green silence comes to me..
they get it too..

time to go..
on the way out she notices the garden.. it's been hot this week .. day after day of high 30s.. roses all wilted..

and now in a warm kitchen on a saturday night.. rain pouring on the roof, at the door and all around the garden..I'm on my own inside the wet music.. a train tooting at the end of the street ..I just want to say that she taught me something else today..the art of deadheading geraniums.. meditative she said.. under the eaves and all along the fence the geraniums had flowered and tossed their pink heads in the heat.. I'd wished the colours back but hadn't thought of doing much to look after them.. just expected they'd come back in time. which they do.. but home in Bristol she has to keep the gs in window boxes and told me if I kept cutting them back they'd flower on and on..
so, after they left I went out and stood in the garden ..the rain had come.. couldn't believe how many geraniums there were.. spindly knitting needles with tufts of pink, red and white petals that came off so easily in my hand.. I tossed the broken stalks back into the leaves and stayed outside breaking off those old spent flowers holding the umbrella like a wand in the other hand until it got dark..
it's meditative she said...
it is

walking with my dog..

2009-11-07T23:53:00.001+11:00

most nights i walk the dog. i think i do it for his sake as much as my own. i like walking and sometimes i believe it wouldn't be such a hard thing to actually walk around the whole of australia. bit by bit i think you could just keep going until you did the circuit.
probably just a silly thought really but i do enjoy walking along and i think i've always been like this.. but having a dog who needs a walk/loves a walk helps..
tonight about 6.30 so still quite light.. after i'd had tea and the house was all silent-nightish what with Dan out filming and PC at the ballet with Pip i took Paddy up to the petrol station to buy a copy of the Herald-Sun.. M has his regular weekend pieces in but until someone at school told me i didn't know he had his photo as well so was keen to see it for myself..
walked up alright but they'd sold out and the grumpy attendant in the shop told me he didn't have any idea where i'd get the paper .. he was so blunt i was out of the place tout de sweetie..
decided to go back home via the car yards.. lots of little garden delights on the way.. no interest in the cars .. humvee hohum..
as i passed a driveway i noticed a black scottish terrier was wandering about with a long red lead dragging along beside him. he got a bit frisky with paddy but nothing too risky in fact i saw how overweight blackie actually was and i had a quick mental picture of a tubby scotsman wolfing down another chocolate cupcake while i was pulling paddy away and on the path to home.. noone about so blackie kept on walking with us.. waddling really... and after we'd passed 2 houses as a threesome i began to worry that the owners would wonder where he was.and why i was taking him.. i picked up the lead and started walking back with the two terriers.. i got to the open gate and a thin sickly looking man was standing there .. actually i could tell straight away he was drunk.. pock-marked skin, strong liquor smell all around him and pie-eyed but so friendlylike.. i held out the lead and he tried to take it. it dropped on the ground as i passed it over so there was this lost time while he scrabbled around and got it in his hands.. so grateful he was.. then he looked slightly worried and motioned further up the street with his hand and said "the other one is where??" in the distance i saw a large black ridge-back next to someone in a wheel-chair and they seemed to be moving away from us.. by this time i'd started walking off and called back to the fellow and told him his dog was coming back.. the wheelchair person was crossing the road and i could see the dog must have been lead by them ..we got closer to each other.. i could see it was a woman in the wheelchair, with a bright orange flag flapping above her.. she was on her way back and had a great soft smile on her face.. i told her i'd taken the other dog back and she was just so pleased.. a real goodness in her that i saw..
i was just glad i'd gone out walking..

birthday wishes..

2009-11-05T20:48:00.052+11:00

It's my dad's birthday today..The day after the Melbourne Cup and the feast of St Charles Borromeo.. If Dad was still alive he'd be 96.. Because he died at 63 I have trouble picturing him as an old man.. Would he have shrunk in height? have any hair left? be able to see? hear? read? write? still drive? have a walking stick? sound really Aussie when he spoke? (he had a flat, plain voice though he could hold a nice note when he sang) Would he still be going to mass every day? Praying the rosary (his favourite prayer)? Reminding all of us that our main job on earth was to know love and serve God?

I wonder if he'd be outside watering the garden or cutting roses for the lounge room table.. Every now and then he'd have a dance in the kitchen with mum..there'd be hardly any room and she'd have an apron on but there was always a lightness in the way he held her.. she could have been a china vase.. As he got older would he have kept on doing repairs around the house? (he was so practical and could work out the way to do most jobs by himself that it was probably only the installation of an oil heater which never quite came off.. ) Would he have come and stayed with each of us in our homes after we'd married? I'd like to think he would. I wonder if he'd have been close to the 29 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren who now make up the Devlin clan. Would he have read them stories? Taken them for a walk to the paddock? Shown them how to milk a cow? Mow a lawn? Paint a wall? Would he have encouraged them to barrack for the Tigers? C'arn the Tigers he'd say and he'd look like the boy he must have been in his inner city days.. all energy and camaraderie with his footy going mates..Sport was the one part of his life where he could turn off from the pressure of politics and work.. I wonder if he'd have tipped the winner of this year's Melbourne Cup? The race often fell on his birthday and I still think of it now as his special day.. At night in the week leading up to the race I'd see him studying the form.. He used a technique that involved listing the horses which had been selected only once by the Age and Sun tipsters to come 1st 2nd or 3rd, He'd examine each horse's form over recent starts before finally coming up with his choice. He used to say that those tipsters had some inside information that few people knew about.. This was the knowledge he was looking for when he sat at the table with the papers.. Afterwards it was only a matter of acting on that knowledge with a good bet at the TAB on the morning of the race.. I remember the few times when those leads paid off and he did a jig with the trannie in the kitchen after the race was over.. I liked seeing him this happy.. I liked seeing him relaxed..

I wonder if over the years he'd have become a little less rigid in his approach to life? I hope so..I think he'd have found it hard to change but maybe - that lovely double-sided word full of desire and possibility that lingers in the air when you say it slowly- MAY BE the happiness in the lives of his children might have lead him to think there could be other ways of living.. It was in his nature to think deeply about the purpose of life and he was often intense in conversation which affected his relationships with us.. For him there was just one reality and that was the truth of our Catholic faith.. Nothing else really mattered beyond the journey we were all on..He spoke about the state of grace as though it was a physical place we had to be in..Always..
Were we? Could we be? Was it really all that mattered?

I wonder if he would have ever got to the stage where he worried about the world a little less? Would he have softened his views about the Australian Labor Party? Probably not. I don't think he ever forgot the years before and after the Split.. How astonished he'd have been at the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of Communism! I remember how sad our house was when the Hungarian revolution happened.. I was just a small kid but the black and white photos in a Time/Life magazine haunted me for years after I saw them .. His fear that some similar thing might happen in Australia if the Commos took over scared me as well. I took so much notice of what he said.. So often he seemed to be right in the things he spoke about.. I knew he had no interest in wealth or position, he'd say all he wanted was a fair go .. Mum said he changed from the time they were first married when she recalls he was a lot more easy going.. His work with the trade union movement and later the National Civic Council seemed to bring out the worrier - and the warrior- in him.. He was always ready to attack Communist ideas or defend his Catholic beliefs..It just seemed like a hard way to keep the peace..

And so today November 4 2009 it's his 96th birthday.

I hope I see him again and I hope when we meet he'll know me as the daughter he loved as well as the woman I've become. I'd like to look once more into his grey-green eyes and see the part of him I loved .. his humility, his humour, his wisdom, his warmth.. I'd like to think he'll say he missed me too..

days like these..

2009-09-10T00:15:00.007+10:00

Cold,
rain that comes and goes, comes and goes,
tree by the window shivering itself dry,
a slippery greenness covering the back yard.
On days like this I think of Gippsland.
After school I'd put on a coat and gumboots and walk across the road to get the cow.
Down by the velvet green of the bowling club-two carpets clipped and rolled-
past the house of the kids we never played with
and along the sponge of nature strip that ran all the way to the footy oval.
I 'd go in by the gate.

The paddock with its paths like old ropes tossed from the clouds,
a hidden creek, magpiesong, the cow waiting somewhere,
and my bootprints pressing into puddles of sky..

water poem..

2009-09-04T09:11:00.006+10:00

i came upon this yesterday..

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2009/aug/27/swimming-lake-district

paddock..

2009-08-27T23:32:00.006+10:00

for the last month i've been preoccupied with the idea of a book about Ireland.. my Ireland..

Edna O’Brien was a country girl too. I didn’t know that when I was growing up but when a friend gave me three of her books because he thought I’d like her “..the ground was speckled with little wild flowers. Little drizzles of blue and white and violet- little white songs spilling out of the earth” I couldn’t believe my luck. I saw the paddock!

The land that lay beside and behind the bowling green across the road from 55 was almost a secret. The paddock belonged to the Shire of Morwell but apart from us nobody seemed to know it was there. Did Dad pay rent for it? I don’t think so. The L-shaped block could have been our own private property for all the world cared. It was a small empty country with different types of grass, a string of tracks, a hidden creek, brown snakes and magpies. For more than ten years it was the place where we kept a cow. Clara, Gina, Velvet and Mammy. Each one came with her own looks and particular ways though there were some things about keeping a cow that were the same no matter what. Once I started milking, my fingers smelled sour all the time as if a trace of the pale liquid was going to stay with me forever to remind me that underneath everything I was a cow girl..

We milked morning and afternoon every day of the year regardless of the weather. My eldest brother and sister started off with Clara and for a few weeks the novelty made it seem like an adventure I couldn’t wait to be part of. Then I saw the truth. The cow never went away. Each morning before school someone had to go over to the paddock and find her, walk her back past the Bowling Green past Budge’s on the opposite side of the road and into the shed where the wooden bail clicked her in. Her thick hairy tail was caught on a nail on the side post and a small leg rope attached to the wall made sure the bucket was safe from a sudden stray kick. The cow needed hay to chew on and water to drink and only then was someone ready to milk her. When the milking was done whoever had brought her over had to take her back. The whole business was a two person-two times a day job.

In the very beginning the milking was done out in the open air. By the side of the bowling green in the top corner of the paddock and in full view of anyone walking or driving to work at the SEC, my sister and brother took turns milking. . It was a few weeks before Dad made a bail in the shed with a concrete slab to stand on and a wooden plank to lock in beside the cow’s head. There were gaps beneath the walls and for a long time no gate to close the shed in. On windy days it was cold, hard work..

in his image...

2009-07-30T16:02:00.006+10:00

I notice him as he leaves the stage at the start of intermission. Tall, thin, spectacled, a halo of wiry brown curls. The cellist from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is the image of my late friend Robert.

For almost 20 years we wrote to each other - the correspondence beginning not long after he left Victoria to return with his wife to live in Sydney and ending with a card which he wrote from his bed in a palliative care unit two weeks before his death in September 2003.

It was, I suppose, an unusual friendship. Our connection was forged when he was far from here. My husband had begun as the correspondent and then one Christmas for reasons I cannot now remember I took over. Books, our children, teaching, writing, travelling. Over time, we became attuned to each other in ways neither of us could have expected. Perhaps it was the simple freedom that long distance friendship offered. All I knew was that a silent solidarity grew in those small tight bundles that appeared in my letter-box every few months.

He viewed the world with an exceptional intelligence and yet I sensed that because of this, found it difficult to accept that so often people behaved irrationally. He just couldn't understand why..

When he became ill we visited him in hospital. I was shocked by his appearance. He'd lost weight and had little energy to move around the ward.. He told us he'd made the decision not to pursue further treatment after the oncologist's report suggested there was no prospect of recovery.

I saw a sad dignity swimming in his eyes.

The cellist's appearance on stage the other night was extraordinary..
I could only see my friend..

that life..

2009-07-27T14:13:00.005+10:00

The files come in an R.M.Williams bag. Six thick manilla folders crammed with letters, reports, newspaper cuttings, leaflets, photographs, speeches and a hundred other things that made up an office in Gippsland in the 50s, 60s and early 1970s. My father's working life in a brown paper bag the weight of a small suitcase.
I open it up and find that life again.

bike morning..

2009-07-23T11:36:00.009+10:00

most Thursdays and Fridays I go for a ride around the town.. this morning there were puddles on the path..puddles?..
I pulled my phone out from my right sock-leg and took a couple of pictures..

Winter in Berwick, July..

july sunday..

2009-07-22T22:19:00.002+10:00

out in the yard on just-cut grass
three blackbirds and a starling are skating from the shed to the clothesline

a ping of birdsong pulls me from the kitchen table
to stand in sunlight by the open door.
I stare through wire screen diamonds
and breathe in my own stillness..

they sift through cuttings, squabble, dance and -
to the windchimes' ripple underneath the eaves -
the starling wings its way to the birdbath,
dips its beak and sunlit body
into the middle of that stone waterhole,
flicks out the washing-up, then
like bells that play one note
over and over and over
those blackbirds break into song,
a one bell choir
on a winter afternoon..

night reading..

2009-07-09T23:47:00.005+10:00

should continue the Tassie signposts but tonight i can't take my mind off the book i've just finished..

Brooklyn by Colm Toibin..

it's quietly brilliant..

tour de tassie

2009-07-05T23:28:00.005+10:00

we've been away in Tassie..
green island dreaming.
wet gum trees,
puddles in paddocks.
long and winding roads..

from the notepad-

Nive River
Tungatina Power Station
Highland Lakes
Bronte Park
Lake Binney
Brady's Lake
Bronte Lagoon
Lake Echo
Dee Lagoon
Osterley
Laughing Jack Lagoon
Brown Marsh Creek
Clarence River
The Wall in the Wilderness
Little Naveire River
Franklin and Gordon Wild Rivers National Park
Coates Creek
King William Creek

rain glorious rain!

Mt Arrowsmith
Gifford's Creek
Surprise Valley
Squire's Creek
Taffy's Creek
Mt Gill
Franklin River
Frenchman's Cap
Stonehaven Creek
Double Barrel Creek
Donnaghy's Hill
Collingwood River (wide and flowing)
Cool Creek
Scarlett Creek
Wildlife Dusk to Dawn (warning to motorists)
pink heath

___________________________Bees_____________________________(on a bar across a road)

Cardigan Creek
Patrolman's Creek
Snake Creek
Raglan Creek
Victoria Park
road winds like green snake inside the bush
(i think of Keira Knightley's Atonement dress.. the folds of)
Nelson Creek
Nelson River
Valley Creek
steam rising off the road/

more to follow

winter magic..

2009-06-25T13:55:00.002+10:00

and the poppies are back on the mantlepiece once again..
just lovely!

for june 22..

2009-06-23T22:12:00.000+10:00

i do not write
i do not write
i do not write
because the time's not right..

yesterday my sister's birthday..

i tell one person at school that it is her birthday and across a crowded table at morning tea she says "treasure her memories all day.."

i do..

night..

2009-06-23T21:52:00.010+10:00

yes yes, it's so late.. the house is still.. PC in bed.. Dan just home from a movie.. "not bad" he says then his phone rings and he's off to his room leaving me alone in the kitchen.. footy's over.. I fell asleep in middle of the third quarter.. knew the Demons had no chance of pulling the game back from such a long long way..the best part of the night had been the thin black magic man who leapt and ran and fell in front of goal and booted the ball in sideways!!!.. he made his mark and they danced in their seats, his girlfriend up on her feet and his mum and dad and grandmother sitting there in one long line of Northern Territory colour smiling and taking him in and taking it in, the whole thing in, again.
and that was it for me, I lay back in a corner of the sofa and took the evening in like that..
and now in the kitchen at the table once again and with one click I'm back on a page of poetry.. an a to z of poets to be precise..though I never am I do not think..precise.. but here it is and here I am.. Heaney in Mossbawn Sunlight, even Dahl reading Little Red Riding Hood in a way that only a sly old fox could .. and both are good.. really good..and I mark them as favourites with the orange star at the side of the screen then something makes me look again and I find the name Ciaran Carson and knowing nothing click on this and Belfast Confetti comes up and Snow and I listen in awe here in the tick tock still of a kitchen in Gippsland and know as i know my fingers are finding these letters on the keyboard.. i've found another Irish mine..

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/trackListing.do?poetId=29

best part..

2009-06-14T20:43:00.007+10:00

I was just watching a behind the scenes doco on the making of the movie Benjamin Button and the woman who played his mother said this-

"the best part of life is loving as much as you can while you're still living."

how good is that!

littleboywriting..

2009-06-01T22:49:00.003+10:00

Teaching is full of marvellous moments.. take these-

by J.........
25.5.09
Today I lost my tooth. But I lost it doon the dran. I tried to get it aut but I kouldnt get it aut. I cried and cried and 2 big gols helpdt me to get it. But it was goon. Pepol said fget abot it. But I said I krnt. Pepol said Just think that you still have your tooth. So I tried and I did it. I was so prod of my saf.

1st.6.09
On Sunday I played footy. My Dad said write a letter to my sune wen he is 16 becos he will be rede to play for Carlton on tv. I love Carlton so much. I love woching Krusu on taley. I love woching Judd play and Fvola. I love Judd so much. Cats are dowing the best this yeur. If Carlton sday on the top 8 we will be in the Grand Fials.
I played footy and my dad said "you have inprovd" Footy is like the besdis thing in my liyf.

report thoughts...

2009-05-28T22:52:00.011+10:00

For the last three weeks on my days off I've been writing reports. When I wake in the night more often than not I'm thinking of those litle kids working away at school..

In Victoria now, the report model that all schools are obliged to follow goes like this..
what the student has achieved...
areas for improvement/future learning....
what the school will do to support the student's learning.....
what you can do at home to help your child's progress...

For all the limitations there are in following a prescriptive format, in the end all I can do is try my best. One by one I go down the list.. Because I teach part-time I write 13 reports.. half the class of 27 - one of the boys is away for the term, travelling in Western Australia with his family.

Maybe it's because I've managed to finish over a week before the deadline or maybe it's the fact that somehow I've just put down what I know about each child, tonight I feel relieved. (My great fear every semester is that I won't know what to say...)

I slide the cursor up and down the screen and discover there's one more..

Frances finds it hard to run about or even hold a pencil so weak is her muscle tone.. She speaks softly too and in the busyness of the class it's extraordinarily hard to make out what she says. But I know she's happy.. the others take care of her.. pull out her chair, find her books, write letters for her, carry her lunchbox to her table. look after her on the playground.

Frances has settled into grade one very well. She has a gentle, friendly nature and is well liked by her peers. She brings out the best in everyone...

The last report I realise is a model of hope for the class..

sister on a string..

2009-05-16T12:08:00.004+10:00

all I can say about this photograph is that there's a story attached to it.. I wish I could tell it here right now but the time's not right..
one day it will be..

once upon a winter's day..

2009-04-29T22:57:00.012+10:00

They are working away merrily on this late April afternoon, chatting at their tables as they draw pictures about what they think life was like in the Olden Days. I go around the room seeing carts and candles, horses and campfires appearing on the page and as I pass beside the table just near my desk, one of the girls speaks.
"Nice boobs."
I stop and look at her.
"Sorry?"
"Nice boobs" she blushes. She's quiet and a little nervy and generally reluctant to speak up in front of the other children. It's only in the last couple of weeks that she's begun to come out of her shell. I lean my head towards her and cup my hand around my ear to show I don't understand. She tilts back and her eyes slide down to my legs and then I hear her. For the first time. "Nice boots" she whispers and I stare hard at the floor.
"Oh yes, they are, aren't they. Really nice boots.."

little recipe..

2009-04-02T17:50:00.021+11:00

The first person I met when we moved into this street was a woman named Pearl. She lived next door with her husband, and not long after we arrived I saw them through the window of our sunroom sitting together on a wooden stool in the back yard. They sat close, like a couple of grey sparrows resting beneath the liquid amber tree.
Pearl introduced herself as we stood watering the front garden one morning.
I liked the light in her eyes.
A few months later her husband, Ewan had a heart attack and died. From then on Pearl lived alone. I’d hear her pottering about in the garden and if she was there while I hung out the washing, we’d talk to each other across the fence. One morning she grazed her ankle with a spade while she was digging. Later I went in to ask her to come for a drive with us – it was a hot day and we were going to the beach but she said she felt unwell and I remember seeing a pink bandaid stretched across her foot. The skin around the wound was puffed and shiny. She told me her leg felt sore and that a rest would do her good. It was the last time I spoke to her. By that afternoon her tongue had begun to swell and later the same day her daughter arrived and called for an ambulance to take her to hospital. She died a day or so later of tetany.

I never forgot her.

The morning I’d come home from hospital when Anthony was a baby she’d left a tray of lemon slices on the doorstep. The sun shone, a bird sang and Pearl produced morning tea.

She gave me the recipe for them and here it is:

Lemon Slice
½ lb Morning Coffee Bisc
3 ozs Copha
½ can Condensed Milk
½ cup icing sugar
1 cup coconut
Juice & rind 1 lemon

Method
Place ½ Bisc on a greased tin 9x9. Melt Copha, add milk, coconut, icing sugar and lemon. Mix well & pour over biscuits. Place rest of biscuits on top. When set, ice with lemon icing. Keep in fridge.

* Since Metric, the cans of Cond Milk are a little larger so barely ½ can would be sufficient. P.R.

Pearl's handwritten note is still intact though cookery books and magazines have gathered on top of it in the kitchen drawer. Her recipe endures. Old friendships are a bit like this.

20 things..

2009-03-31T15:06:00.005+11:00

She writes a letter to me every week from the time I leave home in February 69 until she’s in her mid 80s. Macular degeneration.. Oh well, everybody’s got to get something she tells me. Her mum told her this.
Whistles to herself.
Loves the moon
Sleeps with a small black transistor under her pillow
Has an amazing memory
Tiptoes when she walks. Never gets used to walking in bare feet flat on the ground.
Wishes she’d learned to swim.
Eats slowly and not a lot.
Sits at the table with her chair half in half out
Always asks what time you left when you finally reach her door
Likes changing furniture around
Keeps up with the news
Remembers everyone’s birthdays. Sends cards with a couple of scratchies inside.
Hates losing things
Misses being able to read
Likes watching birds dipping in the birdbath outside her kitchen window
Is good to talk to on the phone
Loves music
Agrees with people
Misses my sister so much

the picture below..

2009-03-20T10:45:00.010+11:00

Just before I went to bed last night, after I'd spent much of the day writing about travelling in Ireland with Michael and Amthony in 2005, I had the sudden thought that I should put a picture of my 5 children on this blog..

So here they are
5 works of art
5 poems if you will

Poems?
Well, about 20 years ago I heard an interview on the radio between Terry Lane and the poet Tony Lintermans and TLa asked TLi what he thought a poem was and TLi replied the brevity of passion

That struck me as a perfect way to describe a poem and, as time went along, I realized it was the best way I could describe and understand our kids..

Each one a work of art,
Each one a work in progress,
Each one a poem!

I still see them this way..

Tom, Mike, Dan, Pip, Anth
Thanks once more for your love..

5 in the hand..

2009-03-19T23:16:00.001+11:00

summer sister..

2009-03-06T18:13:00.013+11:00

I wake in lemon light
a cup of tea on the drawer beside my pillow,
birdsong,
the first swim of the day,
lying on cold sand listening to the sea,
lying on a straw beachmat with the smell of pressed hay coming all the way from China,
reading,
the feel of a good biro,
words spilling out of my head and onto the page,
listening to my brothers' and sisters' voices,

missing one - Michele's....

the warmth of Davey’s head as he leans against my chest,
Liz’s smile when we reach the verandah at Indented Head,
riding her old bike beside the water all the way to St Leonard’s,
flying down sand tracks and stopping off at the pier,
sifting through a carpet of shells,
finding driftwood in the shallows,
getting stuck in the supermarket at Ocean Grove and not caring- using the time to study faces and bodies and finding some bright thing in each one of them

being in the company of the clan..
how different it is without her..

NIGHT MOTHER..

2009-03-01T22:45:00.006+11:00

THIS IS ABOUT HOW A MOTHER - ME - FEELS WHEN HER SON LEAVES HOME.. FOR THE 4TH OR 5TH TIME(?) .. HOW SAD SHE IS WHEN SHE SEES HIS ROOM ALL EMPTY OF LIFE.. SHE KNOWS SHE SHOULD NOT BE DOWN like this.. WHY IS THIS SO? HE IS A MAN AFTER ALL AND IT IS ONLY RIGHT THAT HE SHOULD LEAVE HOME.. HE MUST HE MUST.. THIS IS THE WAY LIFE GOES.. AND IN TIME..A DAY OR SO..PERHAPS A WEEK SHE WILL SEE IT SO.. BECAUSE SHE WANTS HIM WELL.. ALL WELL AGAIN.. AND HAPPY TOO.. AND LOVED AND LOVED AND LOVED.. ALL THIS GOES WITHOUT HER SAYING IT OR WRITING IT BUT STILL SHE MUST PUT DOWN WHAT SHE FEELS INSIDE TONIGHT WHEN THE LIGHT IS OFF AND THE ROOM IS QUIET...

EARLIER TODAY SHE WATCHES WHILE HE PACKS UP HIS LIFE IN BOXES AND BAGS..
A LAMP AND A MIRROR,
A DOONA, A BED,
BOOKS AND PAINTINGS,
CDS AND GUITAR,
CUTLERY CROCKERY,
COOKBOOK AND UTENSILS,
A PAPER BAG OF VITAMINS AND HERBAL MEDICINES,
A SUNHAT, A LEATHER COAT
SHIRTS ON HANGERS,
LINEN AND TOWELS..

THEN HE DRIVES TO THE CITY WITH ONE BIG DREAM..
THE DREAM IS HIS..
TO START AGAIN..
TO BE WELL ONCE MORE..

AND LIFE HAS CHANGED FOR BOTH..
AGAIN.

poem at night....

2009-02-27T00:27:00.030+11:00

Can I share this poem with you? I'm not sure whether it's legally okay to put someone else's published work on a webpage without getting written permission first - in fact the longer this sentence goes on the surer I am that it's not. However, I hope I'm forgiven, for here it is.

Written by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and titled Gift.

Gift

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

I came upon it in a poetry book a few years ago and used a letter my Dad wrote when I was overseas to mark the page.. The letter was one of the briefest Dad had sent .. 5 lines on airmail paper. He wanted me home again. Neither the poem by Milosz nor the letter from my father had any connection to the other beyond the fact that they both felt so male to me. It was as though only a man could think and write the way they did.

Throughout his life Dad was a gardener.. Fruit trees next to the chookspen, a spinning gum behind the boys' room and a tall liquid amber in the front yard that filled the kitchen window with pale yellow light each autumn..

My husband's a gardener too.. even now when the ground's as hard as concrete something in him won't give up on the idea of trying to get a few things to grow..

On Saturday he turned 60 and we had a party here at home.. The boys carried couches and chairs outside, we borrowed a small marquee and strung lights through the apricot tree. Dan ran PC's favourite music out through an open bedroom window via speakers attached to his ipod.. Nearly 60 people came. I never expected the party to happen. Two weeks ago there were fires burning all over the state. A week prior to that Jack had died. Up until Friday I couldn’t believe the night would really go ahead..

But this post is to tell you that it did.. A great party.
I read the poem too.

a February in Berwick...

2009-02-19T09:16:00.008+11:00

I read a short story by Alex Miller the novelist some years ago -or was it an article in the paper? yes I think it was.. anyway, he wrote about his 9 year old daughter asking him how he knew where to start each time he sat down at his desk.

write the truest thing he told her.. write the truest thing..

with that in mind i'm here to say that there are two true things in my head and they've been there all week... my father in law's death and the Victorian bushfires..

Jack was due to have open-heart surgery later this month but died in hospital on Weds 4th February. He'd been admitted the day before suffering from a severe nose bleed. Peter stayed most of that night with him and though Jack was confused when he left to come home he thought that his dad would be okay. Once the bleeding had stopped, his condition was expected to stabilise and then he'd be discharged. The bigger worry Peter thought he'd have to face was in telling him he couldn't go back to his unit and would need to move into a place where he could receive nursing care. Jack was stubborn. How would he take the news? Instead as it happened there was no such conversation. His Dad's last words in the hospital that night were 'This place is a shambles" The following evening Jack died. A doctor raced into the waiting room and told Peter they'd lost his pulse. Earlier the doctor had let P know that if Jack was to have a heart attack in the hospital neither she nor the nurses would try to resuscitate him. The chances of his survival and recovery were not good. Peter called me in tears. His Dad had just gone. I took in what I could. An ending and a beginning. Dan was in his room and I told him. He was shocked but calm. Pip screamed when I rang ..really screamed and I felt as if I'd speared her. Why wasn't I crying? I was glad Chris was with her. In the background I could hear him calling out what's up? what's up? and then his voice was close and I knew he must have been holding her..After a while they hung up. Then I tried the boys. Two had their phones turned off so I left messages to ring me..urgently. I didn't want anyone to hear the news second-hand. Their responses when I did tell them were somehow the same. Shock followed by a sad kind of realism. He'd made it to 91. Dan and I drove to the hospital together. Miles Davis played in the background. By the time we arrived in casualty it was after 9. Jack had passed away at 7. We met Peter in the chapel on the ground floor- "you won't want to see Dad, he looks terrible.." But I did want to see him.. I needed to say goodbye..
Noone about in the corridors -cold glass, plaster-grey walls and dry rustred paint-drops on the vinyl floor leading into the ward.
A young nurse with love in her eyes showed me to where he was.
In a corner of the 4-bed room, curtains drawn and in the semi-dark Jack lay waiting. A woman in the opposite bed moaned. Wrapped tightly in the sheets, Jack looked like an old athlete. A runner who'd just finished a race. Straining forwards off the pillow, eyes closed, chin taut, bristles on his cheeks. He'd made it to the finishing line using all the energy he had. A whole life's run. In his nose the tubes and cotton wool they'd used to stop the bleeding. Uncomfortable, invasive. He'd have suffered a kind of hell in those last hours. I kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him for that. Some awful nobility in it. I said I knew he loved us too, that he loved me although it wasn't easy for him to say those words to anyone.. For some reason he just couldn't. Then I kissed him again and said thanks for everything.. He'd done his best. His forehead was cold and dry, skin pulled tight like a leather ball. I wished him well. It felt as if his spirit had gone from his body but I thought it could not have gone far. Was he there in the room listening to me? I hoped he was. I was talking to him as if he could hear my words, read my thoughts. I kissed him again. Three kisses, three goodbyes, three regrets...
At times you were mean and grumpy and you wanted so much attention.. too much .. i couldn't give you what you expected.. It didn't seem fair

Did I think this then or is it just now, 10 days later that I'm releasing the old thoughts? The funeral over - it went so well. Not one word was spoken that could have stung the air. Not a word.

Everyone loved him.. what a great man!

I loved his wife -who loved him-and I know that's how I reached him best.

And the other part of the week-two weeks in fact- has been the bushfires.

.. On the news, in the paper and here in my head.. On Saturday 7th February we were in the lounge sifting through a suitcase of Jack's photos, looking for ones that could be used in the funeral booklet. The air con in the corner was blowing over our heads like a sea breeze whilst outside it was 47 degrees, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the state. Less than a 30 minute drive away a bushfire was racing through the Bunyip forest and towards towns nearby. Labertouche, Drouin west, Neerim south. All towns of my childhood . These were the places where dad so often went, visiting farmers and drumming up support for the National Civic Council. Last Saturday those places were going up in smoke. Not only there but elsewhere in Gippsland the bush was burning.. near my brother Paul's home in Churchill -he was standing at his back door, watching the sky when I spoke to him early in the morning and sounded so edgy, a tremor in his voice. "I have friends in Boolarra"..he said "it's seriously worrying..
And on it went.. we kept the radio with us.. 774 had become a lifeline to people everywhere.. The fires were blazing all over the state..I carried the tranny from room to room with me.. Somehow I had to share some of their fear..
Saturday evening Feb 14th was the first time they stopped the bushfire info line and went back for a little while to something remotely like normal programmes.. In this case a soccer semi-final followed by an old BBC comedy show from the 50s or 60s..Just a minute.. Was this to take everyone's minds away from the terror of the fires..the constancy of fear?..

It's relentless.. the smoke smell overnight and in through the doors early this morning, the pierce of the sirens as fire engines from the depot by the railway station a couple of streets away go out again and again..
Where are they going?
will they be safe?
When will it end?

I should be doing something.. not just the money or the clothes..and not just writing.. something actual and practical.. a very real kindness for very real people..
what?

on the way once again.

2009-02-01T17:33:00.019+11:00

An hour after posting the last piece on this screen, Anthony drops a couple of typed sheets on the kitchen table and asks me to interview him. For a job. A Mission Australa position working with African youth in Dandenong. Part-time -19 hours a week - helping refugeees to get involved in sport in the local area. He's made up a mock interview for himself using questions that I presume he's found on the internet. A dry run to help prepare him for the real experience on Tuesday afternoon.

My 29 year old son has had chronic fatigue for around 5 years. For the last 12 months he's been on health benefits, living back home, resting and taking care of himself and has gradually come good again.

I am reading an old interview between John Updike and Martin Amis on a website when Anthony gives me the list of possible questions and his answers to these then he goes off to his room to get something, which I twig is to give me a chance to read over his notes. Minutes later he's back again, smiling and ready to go.

I have not looked at the notes.

So why do you want the job I ask and as I say this I realize I have to be absolutely serious with him. I lose my smile .. My voice sounds plain but strong.

Anthony looks straight at me. I like working with people he says. I know how important sport can be -particularly for youth and I know how to organize things...I'd like to have the opportunity to help others if I can..

And this is how it goes.. as much as I remember what answers he gives me in the interview, -I don't actually remember much of what he says- the thing that stays with me more is the whole way he approaches each question.. the openness of his face, the clear eyed look he gives me, the way he stops talking and sits for a moment to think of what he's saying. the honesty of his replies . how direct he is when he speaks. the way when I ask so what do you find difficult when you're working? and he says that he's learned that if he puts in too much of himself it isn't good. That he understands the importance of keeping a balance between work and a private life.. How he believes this job will allow him to find that balance.. and that one day a week he'll get work washing dishes, something unskilled.. which he's sure won't be too hard to find.

I flick through the answers he's written on the sheets and tell him we've covered everything.. I say if it were me I'd give him the job ..and he smiles and pushes his chair back.

The afternoon goes on. I sit at the table with a cup of tea and listen to a bird chipping an end of day call on the lawn out the back.. The fan above me whirs away as it has for most of the weekend.. All I know is that this is the antidote to the reality of that last piece of writing..

The balance is back.

too real..

2009-02-01T14:06:00.018+11:00

In Victoria we've been in the middle of an extraordinary heat wave.. For more than a week the house has felt as though a thick block of material has been pushed in through the windows and doors and is now stuck there.. It reached 45 this afternoon-113 in the old scale-following a week of 43s and 44- and now there's a bit of north wind to ramp things up even more.. The past few nights I've slept in the lounge with the air con on ..Alone.. The sofabed too narrow, the mattress springs too uncomfortable for two bodies to plot a path to sleep through...My husband prefers to lie directly under the ceiling fan in our bedroom.. Last night I woke at one stage and clutched the bottle of water beside me and thought of the daphne in the pot on the front porch.. During the day it had wilted to the point that like the dead parrot sketch it was a plant no longer. I got up and dosed it with a jug of water from the kitchen..

Elsewhere there's a lot going on..The train systems's up the spout, tracks have buckled like cheap plastic rulers in the heat..Electricity supplies have been on stop-start mode in many parts of the city..and there are bushrires-deliberately lit- on farmland at the edge of my old home town

But this news is not the worst..

On Thursday morning just before 9 am while driving his kids to school across the Westgate , the bridge that links Melbourne's east and west, a man who'd apparently agreed a day earlier to shared custody arrangements for his three children, stopped his car, opened the back door, lifted his 4 year old daughter out of her seat, carried her to the edge of the roadway then dropped her over the side into the water below.. Just like that..

brand new day..

2009-01-21T22:39:00.004+11:00

what a morning!
we wake at 3 and are in the lounge room by 10 past. I pull out the sofa bed, toss on as many cushions and pillows that I can find, haul out the spare doona while keeping my eyes on the screen.

OBAMA OBAMA OBAMA

the time has finally come..
steady, strong, sure..

and in the words of that glorious poem-
In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

Amen
Alleluia
Amen

by way of explanation..

2008-12-11T16:50:00.006+11:00

Recently my sister died.
In the days and weeks that followed I kept a diary on this screen of what it feels like to lose a sibling. What I didn't know was that in the days before my sister's death, she requested that nothing be written about her. Nothing.
More than I'd ever realized, she valued privacy. Hers. Her husband's. Her children's.
The blog pieces veered into their world without their knowledge or consent and for that I'm sorry.

I'll try to write about other things. But not right now.

my boy!

2008-09-27T23:32:00.012+10:00

From-
THE HERALDSUN
AFL GRAND FINAL DAY 2008

Hudson Hawka Knights the Hawthorn Mascot Steals the Show

BY Mikey Cahill

September 27, 2008 12:00am

WHILE Buddy Franklin is the superstar of the AFL, yesterday the Hawthorn mascot stole the show, leading the Grand Final parade in front of thousands of fans.

How do I know? Because I am Hudson Hawka Knights - Hawka for short.

Being the Hawthorn mascot for the 2008 AFL season has been stupendous . . . and sweaty. And yesterday was undoubtedly the highpoint.

I danced from the Arts Centre right up to Treasury Place.

I stopped for about 80 photos, signed dozens of jumpers and high-fived hundreds of fans. Hell, I even managed to thwack the Geelong mascot (HalfCat -- what a lame name), much to the chagrin of the guy inside . . . and incensed Cat supporters. Pussies.

As Hawka, I am expected to be there 90 minutes before each home game, navigating my way into the bowels of the MCG using my Player and Official pass. Am I player? No. An official? Not really.

Instead, I am an event.

Just getting the mascot suit on and establishing vision is an ordeal. The word "vision" is used loosely here, as I can see a few metres to my left and right but not directly in front.

This is particularly dangerous when timid youngsters approach in stealth mode, right in my blind spot, but to date I have not injured any fans.

As for the season's clashes, the best moment was slapping Eddie McGuire's behind.

While that was a personal highlight, it doesn't compare to running out on to the MCG today and representing the mighty, flying Hawks.

Watch out for my special "goalpost routine" that is sure to ruffle conservative feathers.

Mikey Cahill is a writer for extra hit magazine and has been a Hawthorn supporter for 31 years (including nine months in the womb)

daisy buddha..

2008-09-12T14:20:00.000+10:00

apricotblossom....

2008-09-12T13:18:00.005+10:00

watching soccer..

2008-09-11T18:33:00.013+10:00

At the soccer on Sunday I was there on my own. I stood by the rail amongst the opposition parents. They spoke fast and passionately. Someone told me it was a Croatian club and I listened hard to try and pick out a few words as I can still remember a little Ukrainian courtesy of Uncle Jack. Dan was on the sidelines. The woman beside me had a load of silver rings on her hands and was smoking a cigarette. Why did I notice these details and not other things about her? Maybe because it just seemed very European: she looked glamorous and sounded openly confident. Another thing that struck me was that several men came and talked to her and the woman beside her quite naturally. Nothing to do with gender- it was as if they were all equals standing there watching the game. This free conversation amongst parents doesn’t happen with our team. Most of the men just talk to other men. Women are somehow a bit off limits at the soccer. We're the invisible supporters.

Anyway not long afterwards the two women began circling the pitch -it reminded me of a velodrome the way it sloped away to the field- and they walked around that dry loop again and again while the game was going on. After half time I took up a new spot. By now, the women had stopped walking –their goals were down this end- and they sat on the ground a little way in front of me. The younger of the two squatted next to her companion. Within a minute or so, after being nil-all a goal was scored. The woman who was crouching jumped up and began to shout. She put her hand over her mouth and wooollaa-woooollaadd just like an Indian in an old western. She did this for about 20 seconds. Everyone around us was laughing. The game went on and a while later she turned around and apologized to me for the outburst. I said not to worry. With that she came over and told me her son wasn't playing but was sitting in the car watching his team. The goal was God’s gift to him. I wasn’t sure what she meant but then she told me that her son had fatigue -"the chronic fatigue thing" and we clicked. I started telling her about Anthony and she listened so intently that it felt as if I was feeding her a meal and she was eating everything I put out. She’d spent $30,000 trying to find a cure. "Now I try acupuncture. Tell me what you do for your son. I try anything to help." Her son is 15 and has just gone back to school but is unable to do much at all. My son is 27 and I think after four years is finally on the way to being well again. I don’t have a cure for her though, only empathy. She is dabbing her eyes and crying at the same time. She tells me she's Bosnian and that she’s given up her work as an interpreter/counsellor because now she has no energy to listen to the stories of cruelty and torture that have come out of the Yugoslavian war. "I cannot do this work anymore. I have to help my son."

I do not see her son waiting by himself in the car. She points out her daughter on the playground and her husband in the blue and white shirt standing by the race. She tells me he is a beautiful man. We talk about how hard it is to see your children suffer and then the conversation turns to religion. She was raised Catholic by her Christian mum but now, married to a Muslim man says she has the best of both religions. "One god" she says. "I tell my children everyday to treat everybody the same. Same god for all of us."
She also tells me that the parents at this club have terrible stories before coming to Australia. "I don’t like politics" she says.

I leave this game remembering Bob Dylan’s grandmother. Everyone’s got their own trouble she tells him. Be kind.

The Hungarian Uprising..

2008-09-05T14:22:00.013+10:00

A chest of drawers in the lounge room where we keep good tablecloths and cutlery is also the place where a Time-Life magazine is stored. It contains photographs taken after the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956. Dad has brought the magazine home from the Office and told us we’re not to look at it. Only Mum can see it. He turns the pages over for her as though she were a child needing supervision. I hear him say "Eileen, this is what Communism is." Her face changes colour and she looks as if she’s going to cry.

A week later I open the drawer, find the magazine and take it to my room. In Hungary there are streets full of tanks, broken buildings and rubble. Soldiers with guns. Dead people lying on doorsteps. Bodies with arms and legs missing. Children wandering by themselves. Some pictures show mothers trying to climb into graves and fathers wiping their eyes. The men are in coarse jackets and the women are wrapped in shawls.

In Hungary the sun doesn’t shine.

These pictures show me what will happen if the Chinese or the Russians take over Australia. The Commos are the shadowy enemies looking for the opportunity to invade the country somewhere up North. Dad and the others in the Movement work hard each day to keep them out.

I put the magazine back under the white tablecloths and shut the drawer as tightly as I can.

politics when i was 12..

2008-09-04T00:26:00.005+10:00

When I was about 12. Dad took me along when he went to lunch with a man called Frank James. He was a supporter, tall and fat and we went to the RACV club in the city. We sat up at the counter and ate. Just nearby two men started arguing loudly and it seemed as if they were about to have a fight. Dad and Mr Double Barrel were oblivious to what was happening so close. They kept on talking. This was the moment when I realized that as far as my father was concerned, nothing was more important than the work he did with the Movement. Nothing.

from the verandah..

2008-08-29T17:23:00.001+10:00

irish times..

2008-08-28T20:22:00.011+10:00

The Irish adventure begins with a promise written on a paper napkin in a pizza place in Carlton. A few days after having a family meal there I get a text message from Anthony, my 25 year old son.

Did you buy that ticket? Ireland! Was not kidding about that pact mother. And we had witnesses! And an angry Italian outside.

Last thing first.
A middle-aged Romeo is sitting in a car in the side street a couple of metres beyond the restaurant window, with a young woman lying in his lap. Anthony has drawn back the curtain near our table to catch more of the late light and inadvertently interrupted a private moment.

The meal is memorable for more than this, however, and his text message proof that a deal of another kind was made that night. We talk about going to Ireland together, of meeting up in England after he’s backpacked through Asia- and include the possibility of getting together with his older brother Michael, who’s been working in London for the past year. Making a journey with two of my sons seems remote and fantastic as we sit around the table talking. Given it’s been about thirty years since I’ve travelled overseas, the idea of going on the road with anyone feels close to revolutionary.

Six months after this Carlton conversation though, on a cool July morning, the impossible has happened. I’m looking out the window of a Ryanair jet en route from Stansted to Dublin. Below there are tiny boats inching along on the bluest of seas and beside me are my two non-imaginary traveling companions. Anthony’s in the aisle seat studying the Lonely Planet and Michael is dozing, his head nudged against my shoulder like a warm rock.

As we touchdown at the Dublin airport just on 9, the first sign of Irish life is a hare loping through long grass by the runway. There is nothing special in this I suppose, but the sighting excites me.

A small brown truck with“ Serving the Sewing Industry” painted on its battered doors passes by the bus window on our way into the city as does a dowdy matron’s outfit from head to toe that’s on display in the window of Mrs Quinn’s Charity Shop. My sisters have told me that going to Ireland is like stepping back into the past and right now I wonder if they could be right.

We decide to hire a car and to stay in youth hostels for the ten days we’re here. Apart from the one request I make that at some stage of the journey we’ll visit Ballinascreen, the Northern Ireland town where my great-grandparents were born, we have no firm plans about where we’re going.

The trip starts with the realization that we’re so lucky to be alive. At the Dublin tourist bureau we hear of the London bombings. The woman who is helping us find a room for the night disappears after calling us up to the counter and comes back waving a mobile phone in the air as a way of explaining where she’s been. It’s her son she tells us, calling from Soho to let her know he’s okay. She puts the phone to the side of her desk and picks up a pen but after writing down our names says she’s too distracted and sends us off to the lower level of the building where a young fellar will finish the booking.

Outside on the street I get messages from home asking where we are and if we’re safe but the line drops out before there’s a chance to reply. It‘s only later when we reach the hostel that we find out what has happened. The dining room is packed with people staring up at the television on the wall. For the next few hours we sit at a table in the Four Courts hostel watching the Irish RTE One coverage.

Anthony goes upstairs to sleep, Michael stays by the screen and I go out on my own. It’s hard to know what to do. I’m torn between feeling terrible about the bombings and over the moon at being on the footpath where James Joyce once walked. The hostel’s just across the road from the Liffey and under a light blue sky, the river is dark and slow-moving.

O’Donovan, Grattan, Ha’penny and O’Connell.

The bridges have names that remind me of old men. I go over the Ha’penny with a crowd of Dubliners on their way home from work. Someone’s dropped a 1920’s style bicycle in the muddy shallows below the embankment probably for the effect. Stephen Dedalus can never be too far away.

A woman lies curled up on the steps of the Franciscan church next door to the hostel, like a cat on a stone mat. I notice her on our way to check in and she’s still there when we go out for a meal some time later. Most of her teeth are missing and even though it’s a mild day, she’s wearing a thick coat and a couple of jumpers over a long dirty skirt. I look at her eyes and face and realize she’s not much older than me.

There are pubs advertising live music all the way through the Temple Bar district. We find one with a wall of windows facing the sun and go in. For the past year Anthony’s suffered bouts of chronic fatigue and has had to adjust his life around the illness. He rarely drinks anymore. Says alcohol’s not worth it as it knocks him about for a couple of days afterwards. It’s hard to see him like this, so tired all the time. I feel guilty having fun. This night though, he sips on a beer to celebrate the fact that we’ve begun the Irish trip. I hand my camera to a woman standing near our table and she takes a photo of the three of us with froth on our lips sitting under a 1948 poster that says “Guinness is strength.”

We wander past shops and down cobblestone laneways looking for somewhere to eat and find a café above a paper shop. The room is crowded and the tables are hardly bigger than the dinner plates but no-one’s complaining. They’re too busy talking. They could all be eating cream so thick is the brogue. M and A pull faces and nod and nay like cheeky schoolboys while they eavesdrop on other conversations and pretend to be listening to me. It’s late by the time we finish our meal and on the way back to the hostel we link arms together. Although the London events are still swirling in my head, I realize I’m cocooned in the happiness of the moment. As we pass the Franciscan church I put some coins on the steps beside the homeless queen and she opens her eyes mumbles blessyoublessyou before she brushes her skirt down and slips off around the corner.

Anthony and I climb into our sleeping bags while Michael stays downstairs watching more of the news. Around midnight he brings me a Bailey’s in a mug to help me to sleep.

In the morning we pick up a car from the Thrifty depot. I’m hoping for a book of Irish road rules along with the keys, but there’s only a brochure about car hire and a small travel map available according to the German uni student who serves us. At least she can’t find anything under the counter that looks like a book of rules. It’s her first day at work. By the time we’re walking out the door, she’s managed to come up with three suggestions to help us on our way. “Don’t drive on der right. Don’t speed. Don’t drink too much ven you’re driving, I suppose?” I’m amused by her advice but I’m also confused when we leave that office. Neither of the boys has any intention of paying the extra costs to include their names on the hire form yet I know they’re intending to share the driving with me. Anthony just shakes his head when she asks if there’ll be more than one driver. He looks at me sideways to confirm what I should already know. We’re travelling on the cheap. Even the fact that we’ll be going to the North for a few days will remain a secret.

I turn the key in the ignition and fiddle with the gears while Anthony spreads the map of Dublin out on his knees and tells me I worry too much. As if to show me what he means, he leans across the steering wheel and toots the horn at the mechanic as we take off..........

at ireland two boys..

2008-08-28T15:09:00.008+10:00

The trip made me young again. From the moment we talked about it in a pizza restaurant off Lygon Street the idea of Ireland carried energy. It was six months before we met up.

winter afternoon..

2008-08-21T17:20:00.006+10:00

Drumbeats on the tin roof. I pull back the curtains and study the sky. Dark clouds everywhere and pin-straight lines of rain falling through the leaves of the apple tree beside the house. Two crows swoop from the neigbbour's roof and into our backyard. The washing’s soaked. Overhead the drumming gets heavier and louder until just like that it eases to a tip-toeing then silence. The sky’s an empty white. In the space beyond the window, a large insect appears. Gliding like a small helicopter between the dripping branches it seems to be looking for a place to land. There are no other creatures here except that insect and me. I watch it hovering and then settle its feet on a leaf.
Feels like peace.

two smiles..

2008-08-21T15:12:00.001+10:00

Earlier this week my niece Emmeline had a baby. Patrick. I saw her on Sunday afternoon at a family get together on the beach in St Kilda. Ten days overdue, she laughed and tapped her belly telling us it was all a phantom. She looked tired but in the way of most women in the last stage of pregnancy she had an extraordinary beauty, like a luscious rose about to drop its petals.

On Tuesday my brother sent a text just before 8 in the morning to say that the baby had been born. His first grandchild. That message probably went all around the country as he let each of us – his eight brothers and sisters- know the news. I went off to school feeling incredibly happy.

The next night an email arrived with three photos taken in the hospital room. The first picture opened slowly on the screen from the top of my brother’s grey flecked hair across his pale face – a face I realize now, with features much the same as Dad’s- down to his arms where he’s holding a tiny baby wrapped in a bunny rug and wearing a white beanie. My brother’s fingers are spread open across the baby’s chest like wave-lines on a map. One hand spanning the life of another.

The second photo showed four generations of the family - great grandmother, grandmother, aunt and newborn. All eyes are on the baby.

In the last picture, Emmy’s wearing a red t-shirt and her long blonde hair’s pulled back from her face and held in a pony tail. She’s lying sideways on soft white pillows on the hospital bed. Just beneath her, tufts of golden hair escaping from his beanie is tiny Patrick. Lips curled upwards, his smile is a perfect copy of the grin that spills from her eyes.

in the valley of love..

2008-08-17T23:21:00.008+10:00

For the past year my daughter Pip has been in Japan. Chikusa, the village in Hyogo where she's lived and taught lies in a deep valley more than five hours to the west of Tokyo and is reached by rail and road. The first picture she sends home comes via her mobile phone on the afternoon she arrives and is the view from her first floor window. Mountains and forest, rice fields, a narrow road winding across the valley like a pale yellow scarf, a bridge with wooden railings and two trees beyond the rice fields in the shape of lollypops.

At the local junior high school she commences her teaching career and in the tiny rural community regarded by many as the Tibet of western Japan, her year begins to unfold. Sorachi-san, the elderly neighbour in the downstairs flat becomes the friend with whom she walks in the evenings after school as well as the friend who shows her how to separate rubbish into six different groups. Hashimoto-san the school tea lady leaves a note on her desk "There are many extra milk in refrigerator. Would you like use home?" and takes her to her son's baseball game where the crowd sings R-R-R-R-RR! to the tune of We-will-we-will-rock-you! Pip joins the Chikusa choir and learns to play taiko drums and makes chocolate truffles for her students and all along the way in her phone calls and emails she takes us with her. Her brothers and her dad and I move around the Chikusa valley like shadows following sunlight. Her stories are the dances that take her away and bring her home. On the first weekend of July she swims in the Sea of Japan and in the last batch of photos we receive, there she is, grin from ear to ear, in her board shorts and t-shirt standing by the water pretending to surf.

Now after a year in Japan it's time for her to leave.
This morning, twelve months and two days since she left Australia I woke to an email from her, written at Changi airport as she waited for a flight to Edinburgh where she'll be for a month or so.

quickie frm changi‏

To: mum

woke up at seven, feelin kinda strange, bare walls, fridge etc.. a shell.. having my mornin coffee i noticed a few students walking down the hill from school, then a few more, and before i knew it, all of them were walking..... hmmm...... ohmyGOD!! they came to my apartment ma, the WHOLE school, staff too, to send me off, give presents, sing the school song!!!!!! can you even comprehend how overwhelmed i was/ still am???

love you, speak soon..

I read her message over and over and let the pictures roll in my head. If I could I'd have been there too, singing that song at her door.

Poppies..

2008-08-07T18:20:00.037+10:00

Three dollars a bunch from the man at the Sunday market. I buy two, bring them home and unwrap the purple tissue paper.

Some go in the kitchen in a pottery vase on the table, the others in a glass jar by the front door. Just before midnight on my way to bed I notice that the tallest poppy has opened. She's taken off her coat – dropped it from her shoulders onto the table to reveal the fold of her dress. A swish of apricot taffeta. The woman beside her is muffled and stiff. Her lemon skirt's scrunched inside her hood -or is it an arm poking out of her sleeve? Another has her head lifted towards the ceiling-the green coat tangled around her neck. The one beside her can only stare at the dress leaking out from under her like blood ready to spill.

The women by the front door are too chilled to move. Mouths stuck for words - waiting on warmth to speak. The sun should wake them.

In the morning I take a handful to school and put them in a vase on my desk. Just before lunch, Niamh the little Irish sweetheart stops as she's reading her work aloud and asks "what are dose things?" Niamh has a slight lisp. da for the, pwease for please.. Poppies I tell her - but they're really girls about to go dancing when they're warm enough. They'll slip off their coats and dance in the sun.. "Ohh" she squeals and touches the petals. The boys on her table come over to look and Niamh tells them the story. By the time the bell for play has gone the last two women have had their coats taken from them. The crisp green hoods are souvenired then lost on the classroom floor.

###
Mum sticks poppy petals on to a home-made card .."your favourites".. The petals have the feel of paper and look like butterfly wings. Pollen dust smudges my fingers when I open the envelope.

###
Colours of fire, earth and sun,
Creased, pressed, still.
Tongues tied up inside mouths waiting to speak-
they are holding the peace.
Drooped folds, gathered skirts.
They nudge each other in the water.
A bristle of hair,
A mouth split open to show a puckered smile.
Tiny capes on the table.
Fine yellow needles, dusty tops, cup waists.

These women are strong, stooped, bowed, looped, stuck, tucked, short.
They lean into each other's arms-
Thin bodies standing in the deep.
Drinking in sunlight- held in the moonlight.

###
A week later they’ve lost their looks. I take them out to the garden and lay them under the eaves.

Buy two more bunches.

winter's night..

2008-07-11T22:50:00.015+10:00

Just before I left Mum's tonight- we were standing together by the table as she tidied up after tea- I opened up the library book I had in my bag. Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas. I asked if I could read my favourite lines to her.. these ones-

Mr Edwards: Myfanwy Price!

Miss Price: Mr Mog Edwards!

Mr Edwards: I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the flanelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino, tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh wool knitted jacket. I will warm the sheets like an electric toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

Miss Price: I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the money to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is closed.

Mr Edwards: Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer will you say

Miss Price: Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

Mr Edwards: And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for our wedding.

At 90, Mum can't read much anymore. Even with a halogen light and a large magnifying glass, she struggles to see more than blurry images on a page. As I read I heard her repeating the cloth names after me, making little pictures for both of us.. candlewick in bedspreads, tussore silk, crepe evening dresses, ticking in mattreses.. those tiny change tins before cash registers..and it struck me that there could be nothing more lovely than sharing A Play for Voices on a winter's night with my mother's voice whispering in the kitchen beside me. An echo in the wings.

Oh she said as I finished, it's beautiful.

night thoughts...

2008-06-22T23:50:00.033+10:00

On Thursday I went to a funeral. Jim, the sparky fellow with furry eyebrows and a quick smile who happened also to be a naturally-gifted athlete had died earlier in the week aged 73.

In his hey-day he'd played League footy for Collingwood until his knees began to give trouble then he'd gone on to Dandenong in the VFA followed by a coaching stint then record and time-keeping in the local club where my son played. This is where we connected with him. He showed a keen interest in Anthony as a player and in the last couple of years whenever we saw him he always asked how he was going. Couldn't believe it when he heard about the chronic fatigue. Jim would shake his head as he breathed in and then puff out all the held air with a "Bad luck!" and I knew he felt for him. More than most people, he understood what it would be like to suddenly lose your talent.

It was a big funeral. I had to park the car in a side-street at the bottom of the hill and walk up to the church where, like a country grand final it was standing room only. All around the walls and leaning up against the windows were the footballers. Young and old. Suits and casual clothes. Funny to see so many men at mass en masse. They looked a bit self-conscious, or so I thought.

The requiem was about hope yet in saying that it seemed to have the something extra which is almost as important as belief in eternity, at least to my mind. The particular recognition of an individual's life. How this one man- or woman -mattered. The song in other words… In Jim's case his children spoke, all five of them preceded by a fellow from the footy club who loved him like a brother. Jim was a lucky man! The fact of his death was there as well of course. The awful grief on the faces of his wife and kids. The incredible sadness they all carried. The other part of the story.

I left as the crowd spilled out onto the grass at the front of the church and walked in the light rain back to my car.

treewordloves..

2008-06-19T12:56:00.001+10:00

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90 words for my mum..

2008-06-06T23:41:00.019+10:00

Mum had her portrait taken at a photography studio in Fitzroy when she was about 19. Dark hair brushed off her face,she's wearing a white silky shirt with pearl buttons on the bodice. Her lips are slightly parted, little criss-crossed top teeth peeking through- that soft-eyed look drawing you in close.
On the back in pencil is her father's handwritten note
Eileen Mary Bowden.. aged 19
In my estimation she is one-in-a-million.

I love him for this..

soft-skinned
sweet-smelling
gentle voice
calm eyes
strong grip
non-swimmer
tip-toe stepper
wise

happy whistler
heart mender
trusting light
Mother Hen
Joe Robin
daily walker
op shop tea girl
garden friend

giggler from way back
trusting, kind
loyal, patient
non-drinker of wine
steady, forgiving
persistent, true
Bold and Beautiful watcher
could this be you?!

child-like, curious
never could be furious
classy, elegant
prayerful and blessed
moon and stars
music and birds
letter-writing
phone calling
cards sending her words

memory-laden
story-teller
sister
mother
Nan
“One-in-a-million daughter”
my life-giving
friend...

kate

head and heart..

2008-05-22T16:31:00.008+10:00

He’s lying in bed in the palliative care unit listening to a discman. I touch his foot and he opens his eyes and smiles. He takes off the earphones, turns his body to the side and sits up slowly, pressing his hands on to the sheet to raise his back off the pillows. The knobbly bones of his shoulders are clearly visible in the light. His face is drained and thin. “Mozart” he gestures to the cd player, as though introducing me to an old friend.

In the late 70’s he is the principal at the school where my husband teaches. I have the feeling when I meet him of being in the presence of a good man. He is quiet, calm and thoughtful. He sees the best in every student. After six years as head of the school, he moves home to Sydney and although we see one another only occasionally, our friendship continues through letters and phone calls.

When his marriage breaks up he wonders how things could have gone so awry. He misses the company of his wife and young daughters and writes long, sad confessionals of the head and heart that humble me when I read them. How could I have not understood when everyone else who knew us saw it so clearly? Why didn’t anyone tell me she was so unhappy? Why?? I picture him sitting in the house alone and wonder how he’ll cope. Some time later though, the tone of the letters changes. He’s been reading a book by the Englishman Terry Waite which details his experience as a hostage in Beirut. “I had three principles firmly established: No regrets. No self-pity (it kills) and no sentimentality.” In some sense too, when I read the words that follow Waite’s I know he’s found the way to go on. It’s what we make of what happens to us that’s so important.

Then out of the blue, he develops a neurological condition which is difficult to identify and debilitating to live with. My feet feel like blocks of wood, my hands like sausages full of sawdust. It interrupts his teaching and places severe restrictions on his daily life. Each treatment he has is painful and prolonged but as time passes by, and gradually over the next eighteen months, the symptoms start to ease in their intensity and he begins to experience short periods of respite. Although the frustration of facing such slow recovery is evident, there’s also an indication that he might have come through the worst of things and is on the road to better health. He recommences swimming and light running when he feels well enough. The last line of his Christmas letter has the promise of a new start. Everything seems to be going well now. Emily scored 89% in her HSC English exam.

He flies down to Melbourne to address a school reunion. It is the 25th anniversary of the school which he pioneered and he delivers a speech that is warm and considered. I sit beside him during dinner and am shocked by the change in his appearance. His frame’s as light as a boy’s. He has difficulty breathing and eating. A fortnight after the reunion he phones and says his energy has dropped again and tells me his doctor suggests he may have cancer. There’s some doubt about this because no primary tumour has been found and he is told it could be some time before the results of tests are known. A week later however, the news is unambiguous. Cancer is well advanced in his stomach and lungs and is evident also in part of his brain. He is given a month or so to live.

My husband and I fly up to Sydney to see him. He says he wants to sit with us in the sun. I wait beside him in the ward while he slides his legs out of the bed and steadies himself to stand. His belongings are arranged like lines of thought on the bedside trolley. A teacher’s diary, a spiral note-pad and biro, a small black radio and a hardback book The War that Never Ended. The only other patient in the room is a round faced man with flushed cheeks lying in the opposite corner sleeping. In the chair beside him his wife sits reading.

Robert walks slowly out into the sunroom to a couch beneath the windows. There’s a dignity about the way he holds himself, carefully clasping his dressing gown with his hands, holding it over the lower part of his body. He’s wearing pale blue pyjamas knotted with a white tape bow high above his chest. He has no waist. I sit next to him and take his hand in mine. His fingers are lean and warm. He’s wearing his silver wedding ring again which marks the most positive thing that has come out of his illness. “A great reconciliation” he says, “she’s been marvellous to me.” The ring swims on his finger.

He’s lucid and intense in conversation and in this sense nothing’s changed. He speaks about a nurse who waited with him one evening until he fell asleep. A mother of four who had only recently returned to nursing, she tells him her children had taught her what was most important in life. We have to care for one another.

“We’ve got to be compassionate” he says “in the end it’s all that matters.”

He wonders whether I know a good poem about death and I tell him I’ll find one and then we talk about books to read and I watch as he writes down the names of these carefully on his notepad.
I ask him what’s sustaining him and he looks me in the eye. “Love” he says. “This” he nods and motions towards us sitting there. “It means so much that you’ve come to see me.” He strokes my fingers and I feel the firm grip of his hand.. I ask him what he most fears. Again his look is direct and almost boyish in its simplicity. “What tricks my body’s going to play on me” he laughs.

Old students drop by to see him while we’re there. Business men on lunchbreaks. Others phone to enquire when they can visit. Many are from Melbourne.

I find a comb in the drawer beside his bed and run it through his hair. Soft brown curls unravel in the heat then puff around his head like a halo. His fringe flops over his eyebrows and I sweep it back into shape, press the curls down and touch his head. His scalp is small and bony. His hair feels like a bundle of warm wool. I put down the comb and rub my hands along his shoulders and across the back of his neck. I’m frightened my fingers might break his skin but catch sight of his face and notice his eyes are closed and his forehead relaxed. I want to stroke his cheek and ears. Pass my wellness into him.

At the other end of the balcony stretched in a recliner and facing into the direct sun, a woman in a blue floral nightie is filing her nails. Her body is swollen and her legs are covered in bright pink welts that glisten in wetness. Now and then our conversation pauses and the rasp of her emery board is the only sound made in the long room. A plastic tube sticks out from beneath the side of her chair and carries dark yellow fluid into a crumpled bag lying on the floor. She makes no eye contact with me until we stand up to leave, then she smiles.

Mid-afternoon we say goodbye. My husband cries in his arms. Is this it? I think. I want to carry him home, feed him, make him well again. He walks with us to the door of the ward then turns and goes back. The last image I have is of a thin, determined man moving slowly towards his bed.

A week later there’s a card from him in the letterbox. Our address dips down the envelope like the broken branch of a tree. Inside, his writing’s small and firm as though each word’s been chosen deliberately the way a note of music might be before being placed onto the page. “Your love buoys me up and makes this last part of the journey easier, more acceptable somehow. Love Robert.”

No Sooner -Michael Leunig

No sooner do you arrive than it’s time to leave. How beautiful it is, how glorious, yet it’s nearly time to go. So you take it in, you take it in.
And you take a few small souvenirs, some leaves: lavender, rosemary, eucalyptus. A few small pebbles, a few small secrets, a look you received, nine little notes of music, and then it’s time to go.
You move towards the open door and the silent night beyond. The few bright stars, a deep breath, and it really is time to go.
No sooner does it all begin to make sense, does it start to come true, does it all open up, do you begin to see, does it enter into your heart…no sooner do you arrive than it’s time to leave.
Yes, it’s the truth. And then you will have passed through it, and with mysterious consequence it will have passed through you.

Kate Cahill

the red van

2008-05-08T23:26:00.004+10:00

Outside it's drizzling and the tiny coloured flags that run the rim of the car-yard whip in the wind like pistol-fire. I’m sitting in a tin shed at the back of the yard while a salesman sprinkles HP sauce into a bag of chips, mops beads of sweat from his forehead and tells me we’re getting a bargain. I sign some papers and he gives me a key flattened and worn like an old fingernail. A 1983 van the colour of a ripened tomato is waiting under a tree on the nature strip outside. I slide its back door open, hook up the baby's safety capsule then climb into the driver's seat.
No dashboard, no bonnet, just the steering wheel, windscreen and a long drop to the road. The mirror wobbles in my palm like a weak handshake, the glove box won't shut, but the baby gurgles and the key turns in the ignition.

The bongo van.

It’s cheap to run, the motor's quiet, and with five kids it's the only way we can all travel together. My husband takes the tiny blue bomb to work each day and I get the van. A roving red shoe with every window holding the face of a child peeping out.

When I was little my siblings and I were squashed together in a station wagon. There were no seatbelts then and no thought of accidents. Dad gripped the wheel like a rudder and off we went. A couple of times a year we travelled to Melbourne to visit my grandparents. I stood up, putting my feet either side of the hump that lay in the middle of the back seat floor and because it felt like a stage I sang: all along the highway I patted Mum's shoulder and sang little tunes while she nursed a baby and stared out the window.

At ten to nine I drive the kids to school. Past the shops and up the long hill to the steel gates where I park and watch as they climb out. Some mornings they hop off like frogs ready for fun but on other days I feel like I’m unloading tired soldiers whose voices trail away to whispers on the walk towards the asphalt. In the afternoon when I pick them up again, a day's stories fill the little wagon. Lunchtime goals, a lost library book, a friend who's mean. Their voices run over one another like tangled threads that unravel into single strands as we glide down the hill towards home.

One afternoon my daughter picks the front passenger seat lock after reading a Nancy Drew book. She uses a paperclip straightened carefully into the figure seven and pushes it into the hole. The metal snaps inside the barrel like a thin bone and stays there. No key can pass that way again. Another day when they're all on board I hit the dog. As I edge onto the driveway I feel a soft thud underneath the wheels and hear a pierced yelp. In the split-second quiet that follows someone notices the back gate’s open and a chorus of PADDY!! goes up. We find him in long grass at the side of the house, chest pumping, tongue trembling in the air like ticker tape and with a pink lump on his tail. In that space beside the fence, frightened and quiet, they kneel and wait as the breathing eases, the whimper fades and he begins licking the hands that stroke him. I watch as they carry him to the shed, the youngest running on tiptoes ahead of the parade like a king's messenger. It is only later when I'm in the van by myself that I notice my leg won't stop shaking.

On Saturday afternoons I park by the fence at the football oval and watch the older boys. Dark blue thoroughbreds pounding over the dry ground towards the boundary or bogged in the centre-square while rain falls in thick sheets. I turn the wipers on full, strain my eyes to pick out their numbers from the gloom and toot when there's a goal. Some days we go to Waverley and pull in beside thousands of others on the apron of land that lies in front of the entrance. Inside the ground the Record passes up and down the benches and they dribble sauce over their jumpers. On the freeway going home they fling their scarves out the windows and stare backwards at the striped arms that stretch and dive in the dark.

Often on a Sunday we go into the city and I feel my daughter's tiny feet kicking against the upholstery as she arches forward to glimpse the river. Her river. The Yarra lying just below us, curled underneath bridges and resting beside trees like a snake in the sun.

In summer we pack up and head down to the beach. They cram their bodyboards next to the windows and on the boot's tiny floor. Bags of clothes and food lie tucked against their legs. The wind batters us on the climb up the Westgate and we struggle to go forwards, but the Bongo Van fights back. My husband puts his foot to the floor, the tyres grip the road and suddenly we're on top looking out over patchwork land and the blue-grey water of the bay. At Ocean Grove the caravan park lies across the road from the sea and the van slips into a tiny space underneath the branches of a pine. At night we lie and listen to the roll of waves and the sound of the canvas annexe shuddering like a sail in the wind. During the week we drive down the Great Ocean Road and while my eyes follow the blue line that runs away to the sky, the van hugs each curve tightly in a slow, rocking dance that lasts all the way to Lorne.

And meanwhile they're growing up and one day the baby's midway through primary school and the older boys are taking driving lessons from their Dad. Clutch- gear -accelerator are the only words that matter on the back roads and then they have their licences too! Bit by bit the van show its age: dents appear on the duco, the gearbox packs up, the grey felt carpet peels away to a red metal floor and one night the engine seizes. Everything the Bongo Van needs now lies in rows of rusting bundles at the wreckers.

The boys get their own cars and we stop travelling as a family. The younger ones don't like to be seen in the van any more. Too daggy. My husband takes it to work each morning and I have a yellow sedan. At night though I reclaim it. Two kilometres from home is the park where I walk the dog. I toss the lead onto the back seat floor and Paddy jumps in. He pokes his head through the gap in the front seat and a hot, fluttering breath hits my neck. I drive into the car park thinking of the kids, hearing their voices and remembering how they all once looked in the seats behind me. Five bodies folded against each other like the pages of a book. I slide the side door open and Paddy bolts for the track that winds like a hem around the creek. I shut the door behind him and follow.

Gina, our ship on legs..

2008-04-17T13:37:00.005+10:00

Mid-autumn and the pollen's lying beneath the old tree at school once again. Yesterday I watched three Grade 1 girls scooping it up with little sticks on the wall of bricks and tiles that runs around the trunk. The story I wrote a few years ago about Gina is reprised here from a yellowed page of The Age.

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.

Remembering Kevin

2008-04-13T14:58:00.004+10:00

Remembering Kevin

While I was reheating some spaghetti for lunch today, I began thinking about Kevin, a friend of my husband. The two of them used to teach together. Kevin was single and lived in a share house in Oakleigh. He came for dinner a few times when the kids were little. What I remember most from those nights was the way he played with them –he always went a bit crazy in the sense that some people who don’t know how to behave go overboard and excite an energy in kids that makes them loud and wild.

On the first evening he was here, after the boys had finally calmed down and gone off to bed Kevin spoke about his childhood. Like me he’d grown up in a large Catholic family with a number of siblings in each bedroom and where religion played a big part in daily life. Unlike me though, his memories of those days were mostly miserable. With 14 kids in his family- 5 more than in mine - Kevin said he never felt there was enough of anything to go round. That included love. I got the sense from listening to him that although he lived in a crowded house his childhood wasn’t much different to an orphan’s.

One Sunday sometime after we’d gotten to know him, we went to his place for lunch. The kids played out in the backyard while we sat in the kitchen and had a drink before eating. We’d brought a bottle of wine and Kevin produced 3 vegemite glasses which was fine. What I couldn’t get my head around however, was the table cloth. It was one of his sheets. The stripy flannelette kind that thins out after a few washes. The kind that carries little pills of fluff where it’s been worn away. As we sat there with him, all I could wonder was when he’d last used it. When he served up the meal- the empty bottle of Paul Newman Bolognese Sauce was on the sink beside the stove- I found I had no appetite. I had to force myself to take a few mouthfuls and drink the wine as slowly as I could.

When my husband turned 40 we had a party at home. Friends and family came and the house was alive with music and talk. Kevin arrived early in the evening but didn’t stay long. In fact he walked in the back door and passed through to the front before either of us had time to realize it. The gathering had simply overwhelmed him.

Beyond what I’ve written here, there’s not much more to say. I know before we’d met he’d been a Brother in an order in Western Australia and I also remember what my husband said -that he had no real idea about how to teach.

When he left the school at the end of the year and moved away from Melbourne it turned out to be the last we saw or heard from him. He gave no forwarding address and made no return visits. We lost touch.

In hindsight I feel ashamed I didn’t help him more but the truth is, I got tired of his company. Whenever he came round the past always came with him. It was like a bag of old stones he tipped open on the table. I wished for the day when he didn’t have his heaviness but that time never came. All I hope now in remembering him is that somewhere along the road he met someone who helped him carry the weight.

Farewell friend

2008-03-22T23:17:00.005+11:00

"Irish author John McGahern has died in hospital in Dublin at the age of 71." The brief news item said that McGahern's death had followed a long battle with cancer. I was shocked when I read this, I'd hoped he'd live to be 100.
I first came to his work some years ago when a friend lent me a copy of Amongst Women. He told me I might find something in the story of a man facing death and the effect it has on his children that could help me understand the way my father's dying influenced me and my siblings. I was glad I did. Amongst Women took me into the story of a family where the father at times seemed the centre of the universe. It was territory I knew.
I was hungry for more of his writing. I found a short-story collection in the local library and here I discovered an Ireland where history happened to ordinary people. The Troubles were in the living rooms as well as in the pubs. I liked the way McGahern could see the worth of little scenes in people's lives. "He poured cream from a small white jug" seemed as important as any other event in the day.
I recommended his writing to others. One night I spoke with a Scottish friend and was happy to hear that, like me, when he got to the last page of That they may face the rising sun, he slowly shut the book, then reopened it and began it again.
I found an essay that McGahern wrote some years ago about the way he came to be a writer. He remembered the surprise of being able to borrow books from a neighbour's home not long after his mother had died. "There were few books in our house, and reading for pleasure was not approved of. It was thought to be dangerous, like pure laughter."
I read the last paragraph of the same article over and over to remind me of the way to write well. "Unless technique can take us to that clear mirror that is called style - the reflection of personality in language, everything having been removed from it that is not itself - the most perfect technique is as worthless as mere egotism. To reach that point we have to feel deeply and to think clearly in order to discover the right words."
I wish that I'd written to him, to thank him for his work. Ever since Amongst Women, I'd carried the idea of doing so.
Last year I travelled to Ireland with my two eldest sons. As we drove down lanes into the mid-west I thought of John McGahern. I knew it was his country by the shelter of trees and hedges thick with a mixture of greenery and light. I wondered if we might bump into him in a shop or if I'd recognize him walking down a road.
I have a photo of him, which I found on the internet, on the desktop of my computer. He's sitting in his kitchen wearing an old pullover, kettle gleaming on the stove, mug of tea on the wooden table in front of him, staring calmly out at the world. There's a soft smile on his face and when I look at that picture I feel as if I'm in the house of an old friend.

(this was originally published in The Age in April 2006)

travelling with my daughter

2008-03-22T20:30:00.004+11:00

SHE’S BESIDE me at the wheel in tee-shirt and jeans, her hair pulled back off her face and tied in a bundle of braids, her mouth glossed with lip balm. It’s 10 in the morning and I’m travelling with my daughter on the road to Strahan following the Derwent as it spools up into the West coast …
Not far out of Hobart we pass through open farmland and small towns, and then the country becomes a still life as gum trees lining the road deepen into thick bush and the silence of forest. There’s ice in the gullies, a soft grey sky and low clouds that mist into the hills. Light rain falls. Sunshine into shadow into sunshine again. As we drive she sings along to a tape and brushes a jelly snake across the steering wheel in time to the music. The white Telstra purrs with her clear, sure voice.
Now and then a car or van passes but for most of the journey we have the road to ourselves. I write down the names of some of the waterways we’re passing. I tell her we have to say each word out loud and let the sound ripple though our heads before I can put it down. Black Bobs Rivulet, what’s a rivulet she asks and why only in Tassie? Bronte Lagoon, E-m-i-ly.. Char-lotte.... Scarlett and Raglan Creeks, make me a red jumper MUMMM…I can’t help laughing. She’s playing word tennis. When we pass over rivers - the Franklin, the Cardigan - the bridges are wide and underneath the roadway swift water the colour of tea streams by. High overhead an eagle is gliding. I watch its slow, heavy flight through the opening between the trees, see it dip as it reaches the mid-point above the road then rise and circle inside that space again. Welcome to the west.
We stop for lunch at Donaghy’s Lookout on a gravelled clearing beside the road and find a small track leading to the lookout point. A wild green forest covers the land as far as my eyes can see and I’m swept away by the thought of just being here. We’re part of all this beauty! The air’s so cold and we’re up so high that when I breathe I cough. I put my hands on the rail and feel ice on my skin. Someone’s left a message on the wood, a finger script in white crystals. LOVE IS THE ANSWER slopes across the ledge and away to the valley. I add the first word that comes to me when I read it. YES!
A large grey cat with eyes like yellow globes darts out from the undergrowth close to where we’re standing then disappears. Pussy gone w i l d she calls. We go back to the car and continue the trip. A bus heading south slides suddenly around a bend and for a moment I think we’re about to be pushed off the road. She steadies the wheel and then waves her hand calmly at the driver. I’m in awe of her confidence.
We reach Queenstown in the early afternoon. As we approach the old mining settlement, the road winds round and round a cluster of bare hills and then it’s a slow, careful descent into the town with the lunar landscape. Seeing the scarred grey earth when we arrive in the main street is like having shock therapy when you’d like a hug.
We laugh, imagining ourselves as Thelma and Louise on the freedom ride to where?
“Anywhere but here” she drawls and keeps on driving.
I think I’m 25.
A short time later we arrive in Strahan and park beside the Macquarie Harbour. A silky skein of water, deep, flat and glassy fills the basin of the Gordon river. We pick up pieces of huon pine and sassafras from the pine mill beside the gallery and the boy in the mill gives us directions to find the best views of the town. I notice his face reddening as he talks. She’s charmed him too. On our way back to the road she links her arm into mine and kisses me on the cheek. We reach the car, slip our seats back as far as they can go and listen to the water lapping at the pier.

(this originally appeared in Tasmanian Times February 2008)

afternoon friend..

2008-03-15T15:09:00.008+11:00

I sit in the sunroom after a day at school. It's hot, the air is still. I can't read the newspaper - too much is required of my eyes and head to do that. But I want to look at something to take me away from things.

In the bookcase beside me, I pick out a hardback - Michael Palin's Full Circle and put it in my lap. Lovely man, Michael. I'd travel anywhere with him. The book falls open on a coloured double paged spread showing his journey around the Pacific. A sweep of blue ocean bordered by green countries, the map is dotted by a bright yelllow trail that indicates the route he took.

I study it all for a minute or so and as I''m doing this, over the top of the page a caterpillar appears and slides across the paper.

A tiger by colouring, an emperor by birth, I watch as the furry traveller pushes through midwest Canada, into the US and out to the Pacific - the prow of its head rising up and down like a listing ship rolling across the waves. A sea breeze seems to riffle the tip of its hairs as it journeys south, then reaches shore and glides overland into Bolivia.

Suddenly it stops.
At the end of the page and the edge of a world, the caterpillar pauses and peers over the side. The railing's steep and sharp. A moment passes before it drops off the map and lands on my knees.

As it steadies then grips the hem of my skirt , all I can feel is nothing but peace that a small, brave creature should choose me for company on this long, March day.

Meditation on mowing..

2008-02-15T15:35:00.003+11:00

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

mine

2008-02-14T23:16:00.004+11:00

mine

In the afternoons she often had a nap. sometimes I'd lie beside her on the bed and touch the soft skin of her arm or rub my leg against her slippery stockings. After a while I heard the drop in her breathing as it went down, down down like a clock winding backwards on the pillow. For twenty minutes or so, Mum was all mine.

little pictures..

2008-02-07T23:13:00.000+11:00

Little Pictures

During the first week of term 1, I’ve been testing the children in my Prep class using a computer program that’s designed to indicate a child’s general level of achievement at the start of school. The test, made up of a series of picture screens accompanied by questions on an audio, usually lasts about twenty minutes and is carried out one-to-one while the child’s parent or caregiver waits outside the classroom door.
It begins with a sample of handwriting.
Some are quick to do this. So confident with a pencil and piece of paper that before I’ve time to click their details on the screen they’ve already finished writing their name. A mix of capital and lower case letters spread across the page neatly like a row of carriages on a train, or perhaps a swish of sticks and circles that look like musical notes. I have to check to see if every letter of the child’s name is accounted for and whether the handwriting is clear to read before giving it a mark from 0-5. Sometimes children struggle to put anything down on the paper and when this happens I crouch beside their chair and encourage them to write whatever they can remember. Often thick strokes appear that remind me of fence posts being slowly hammered into the ground. One boy comes in holding a soft toy and I watch as he tucks the animal between his tummy and the table then picks up the pencil and grips it like a big stick before sliding the grey-lead so lightly across the paper that only a thread of colour can be seen. When he finishes he puts down the pencil, hugs his penguin and hands me the paper. I find his name on the screen, click the mouse and he stuns me a couple of minutes later by reading words, sentences and then a lengthy story about Cats.

Frigglejang. Denalty. Riotous. Enterprising. Observatory. Their eyes widen and they look at me sideways as they listen then pop their mouths open and repeat these words. I’m concentrating on picking up speech difficulties such as stammers
or lisps but at the same time find myself holding back laughter at the way each one responds. There are mumbles and whispers, shouts and giggles as they roll those sounds along their tongues and out into the air. It’s as if they’re retelling little jokes that they know make no sense. One girl tilts back and forth on her tiptoes as steady as a clock whilst she identifies each letter of the alphabet. I love the certainty in her voice and the surprise in her eyes when I hand her a pointer – a chopstick- to tap on the screen. She could be Degas’ Little Dancer as she leans forwards in the sunlight and tries so hard to match the words and pictures that appear in front of her eyes.

Rockets and puppies, ice-creams and fish. They count and match, add and take away. Michael laughs when the 5 and 10 cent coins appear and he hears “Jasmine wants to buy an apple. It costs 10 cents. Which coin should she use to buy it?” “Apples don’t cost 10 cents!” he cries and I tap the mouse and hope he’ll always be this confident with what he knows.

Each child goes as far as they can with the questions and then the program cuts out.
A thin green line glides across the screen to indicate the results have been archived. Later in the day, I’ll study the information and use it to build up the big picture of the range of ability within the class group. For now though, the little picture of each one standing beside me in the corner of the classroom is all the detail I need.

for Bob

2008-02-07T20:30:00.000+11:00

He’s standing on a ladder pruning a tree by the back fence when he slips sideways and lands heavily on the ground. Although he’s in pain, he convinces his wife to drag him on a sheet of cardboard to the back door where he hopes to pull himself up onto the steps. It takes her more than two hours to get him there but only a few minutes after that to realise the injury is worse than they thought. A short while later she calls an ambulance.
Bob and Nan are neighbours who live across the road and in the beginning there’s a chance he might not return home, that he might not walk again, as his hip’s been broken in the fall. The joint is shattered. For an 83 year old man, the situation is bleak. When we visit him in hospital a couple of days later, he’s tense and pale. He can barely move. He says he can’t sleep. Even with the pills they’ve given him, the pain’s too great. He lies on his back on a layer of pillows in the quiet, white room like a man waiting on a miracle.

He’s been able to wait before. During the second world war he sheltered for some hours in a waterway beneath his parents house in Holland while Nazi officers searched the rooms above and the streets nearby looking for young men for the work camps. Bob stayed calm. “I was wet through,” he says, “but I had to keep still. For everyone’s sake I didn’t move.”

He’s also told me of a time his canoe capsized in Westernport bay and he clung to wreckage with his son-in-law before swimming three kilometres across a cold, deep channel to the shore. They reached French Island after midnight, walked barefoot across rocks and mud and sheltered in a disused guard house until they were found.

Bob begins moving about on his legs again, slowly and with great effort but enough for him to be transferred to a rehabilitation centre. After a couple of weeks there, his son brings him home. He’s given a large wheeled walking frame to help him get about the house but it is unwieldy and Bob is tired and he spends most of the day in the lounge room lying on a foam mattress on the couch. It’s hard to see him like this. He is a man who has always been busy with a chisel or drill in his hands. Now the slow pace of his recovery reduces his day to coffee cups and long pauses while he adjusts pillows and positions. Sometimes when we’re talking he finds it difficult to remember words and says his English is not as good as it used to be. He remembers things by thinking in Dutch and then converting back to English.. “De-arg-nosis” he says, “it’s like your diagnosis” and he uses that term to tell me how the local doctor has always been correct when treating both him and his wife “He’s a good man” . We swap a line from an old song, Que sera sera that he asks me to find in one of the dictionaries he keeps in a cabinet. Que sera sera, what will be will be. He likes that phrase he says, because it gives him a good attitude.

Over the next month or so, a little more mobility returns and Bob begins walking to the door on crutches to greet me when I come. .He tells me his plan, how he’s setting his sight on being a lot better “in a little while.” “By degree,” he says “it’ll happen by degree.” But he’s not always so positive.

When Easter comes and there’s not much change in his condition, he says he wonders how patient he can be. “I’m an impatient man” he tells me. “I want to be doing things, not sitting around all day. I like to do things for myself.”

His hip has mended as much as it can but it seems that in the process of his moving about the joint has been forced higher than it should be and now the socket is unable to take much weight. He finds it impossible to stand for more than a couple of minutes without experiencing intense pain. One leg is now permanently shorter than the other. An operation for a hip replacement is the next thing to consider.

He’s worried about Nan too. When she leaves the room to get something from the kitchen, he says she can no longer read and that she tells him there are wavy lines at the corners of her vision.
“I’ve got to look after her.”
Then yesterday morning, a little more than six months after the fall, he phones and asks if it will be alright to visit. I make a cake and straighten up the lounge room. I wonder if the couch will be too soft for him. At 2.30 the bell rings and when I answer it, find them both there, hats and coats on, standing at the door like two pale sunflowers. Nan is holding a packet of Dutch chocolates and Bob leaning on his crutches beside her is carrying a plant for the garden.
It is a triumphant sight.