out of the blue..

Ballinascreen

Ten minutes out of Draperstown Michael taps me on the shoulder “Thought we’d get you something from the town Ma.  You’ve earned it.”

He puts a tape in my hand “Songs and Music of Ballinascreen”. It’s the property of Draperstown Library, where he and Anthony have been for the last hour or so.

We’ve driven from Malin Head the most northerly point of the country to Draperstown in County Tyrone. I’m travelling with my sons and it’s the second last day of the Irish trip. By the time we arrive in the town where my great grandparents once lived I’ve got a headache.  The final ten miles of the trip have been on the winding roads of the Sperrin Mountains.  As we drive, the stony hills give way to thick plantations of pine with their ugly clearings of scarred logs.  The town that’s signposted as the Home of Sperrin Metal has an archway of  trees.  Oak, elm, sycamore?  I don’t know. The branches criss-cross above the bonnet like panels of a green umbrella. Anthony finds a park in front of a butcher’s shop and I stay in the car resting while the boys go for a Guinness and a wander.  That stolen tape comes from the Ballinascreen library.


All I know about this place is that my great-grandparents were born here, and that they left in 1853, the year following their marriage.  My father urges me to go there when I leave home travelling at 23. Although I plan to go to Ireland not long after I reach London, somehow or other  I miss my chance. Now more than 30 years later here I am in the town with two of my sons. What happens that afternoon? Not a lot really. The headache makes it difficult to do much more than lie back in the front seat of the hire car and tell myself I’m resting on the road those Devlins might have gone along a century or so ago.  When the boys are out walking, I get out of the car and walk into the long grass to be sick.  I meet a woman called Mary selling potatoes from the back of an old farm truck who asks if she can help me. Mary is a woman of the fields, and on this particular afternoon tell her the dilemma I’m in about being here at last and not feeling well and she tells me I shouldn’t have waited so long to come to the town.  When I tell her about the Devlins connection she wonders if I mightn’t be related to Brad Devlin in the Post Office and tells the boys to look after y’r mother.  Make sure she gets better and bring her back again.

Then in the car on the road out of town, heading to Dublin  Michael gives me the tape.   I open the cassette cover and find a cream card with a handwritten list marking its lending history. From the first entry in February 85 to the last in May 95, it’s been borrowed 4 times. Something in that tiny number eases my conscience and I slip the tape into the slot and wait.  At first all that comes out is static then silence before the first song begins.  The Verdant Braes of Screen.   I stare out the window over the stone walls to green paddocks that run the length of the road into the hills beyond.  A piano echoes over wooden floorboards and accompanies the thin, high voices of a school choir.  The next song’s better.  A man’s plain, strong voice tells the story of Draperstown 1913.

This afternoon, March 19th 2012 I'm scrolling through old files and find this piece and read it through.  Later in the day the tape turns up.  On my desk.   Out of the blue.  True...

taking her out..

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..

 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...

 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..

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..

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 I remember her?   Some years ago she lived across the road.  A tall girl, stalky if I had to describe the way she looked.  I noticed there were a lot of kids and they were younger than ours or seemed to be.  It was hard to know how many there were. They were quiet, I remember that.  Our kids would be out in the street kicking the footy or riding bikes or skateboards and the kids across the road hardly made any noise.  The house had been rented out for as long as we’d been living here and people had come and gone.  In the early years Peter would go over with a couple of cakes as a welcome to whoever had just moved in.. I think he would have 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’d had time to observe her a little. I noticed she always walked to the shops and brought 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 after school than a mother.

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..

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..